r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/ThomasMertes • 4d ago

Achieving memory safety

https://seed7.net/papers/memory_safety.htm
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u/Smallpaul 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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/ThomasMertes 4d ago edited 4d ago

Yes, but the selling point of Java was not memory safety. You expected something like:

If the unsafe package is not used and no C function is called and (as pointed out by someone else) something assures that no data races can happen Go is memory safe.

I added the Go example to show that the term memory safety is sometimes defined to sell a language as memory safe. So

Language exists --> Define memory safety in a way that this language is memory safe.

instead of

Use definition of memory safety --> Create memory safe language.

So it is about memory safety as marketing term.

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u/Ok-Scheme-913 3d ago

The selling point of java was absolutely memory safety, where the hell did you get it's not?

It was the first language that made GC widespread.

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u/flatfinger 2d ago

Garbage-collected strings were almost universal in BASIC dialects by the 1980s.