[postalrat]

Is JavaScript a memory safe language?

[albntomat0]

Yes, and so are Python, Lisp, Haskell, and a million other languages that were available in 2010.

None of those are suitable options for an image decoding library on the range of WebP supported platforms.

[pjmlp]

Modula-2, Ada, Object Pascal, D would be.

What makes them unsuitabe is lack of widespread compiler support across those platforms, if we ignore how long Ada has been available in GCC.

And Modula-2 is now in GCC as well.

[assassinator42]

Ada has the bounds checking, but doesn't (AFAIK) have a safe way to deallocate dynamic memory. At least as of now, there is a proposal to add something like Rust in the future. It also has memory unsafe concepts like specifying an address for a variable.

[pjmlp]

Yes it does, this isn't Ada83 we are talking about.

Well Rust also has unsafe, better not use it.

[mrtksn]

>None of those are suitable options for an image decoding library on the range of WebP supported platforms.

What makes these unusable for this task?

[sp332]

They need a large runtime and are slow to start up.

[mrtksn]

Is that true for all memory safe languages? Why?

[marcosdumay]

> Is that true for all memory safe languages?

No. That is true for the list upthread (well, if you consider runtimes measuring a couple of MB "large", it's reasonable but quite arguable). It doesn't have much correlation with any feature.

[unilynx]

It is. and so is WASM, but both probably aren't fast enough

[Thews]

I think there is a ~35% hit with emscripten