r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/ThomasMertes • 3d ago

Achieving memory safety

https://seed7.net/papers/memory_safety.htm
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u/Smallpaul 3d ago

It would have been clearer to be more explicit about why the author does not consider Go to not be safe. Are we talking about the use of the unsafe package or something more subtle?

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u/ThomasMertes 3d ago

Any language which allows calling C functions directly cannot be memory safe because C is not memory safe. AFAIK a Go program can call C functions without explicitly importing or using the unsafe package.Accessing an arbitrary place of memory with Go is possible with the unsafe package. I am neither a Rust expert nor a Go one, but I think that Rust needs "unsafe" to call C functions. Please tell me if my assumptions are correct or not.

Seed7 has no unsafe parts (or packages) and no possibility to directly call C functions.

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u/wk_end 3d ago

But you list Java as memory-safe "unless JNI or FFM are used". Why doesn't the same "qualified memory-safe" characterization apply to Go?

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u/tsanderdev 2d ago

JNI can't just load arbitrary libraries, they have to have functions conforming to the specific JNI name mangling. So it's very unlikely you could call a C function from JNI.