[bluGill]

Why is garbage collection called memory safety? Garbage collection in whatever form is only memory safe if it doesn't free memory that will still be used. (which means if you actually get all your free calls correct C is memory safe - most long lived C code bases have been beat on enough that they get this right for even the obscure paths).

Use after free is important, but in my experience not common and not too hard to track down when it happens (maybe I'm lucky? - we generally used a referenced counted GC for the cases where ownership is hard to track down in C++)

I'm more worried about other issues of memory safety that are not addressed: write into someone else's buffer - which is generally caused by write off the end of your buffer.

[constantcrying]

>Why is garbage collection called memory safety? Garbage collection in whatever form is only memory safe if it doesn't free memory that will still be used.

Yes. A garbage collector is only safe if it works correctly. What an irrelevant observation. Nothing can guarantee that something works correctly if it doesn't work correctly.

[bluGill]

Keep reading. That is all a garbage collector gives me. there are lots of other things that that are memory unsafe that garbage collectors don't give me.

[foota]

To answer your question, I'd say it's memory safe when it's a part of the runtime. At some point, you're relying on your runtime to be correct, so if it says it does garbage collection then you can rely on it, in the same way you rely on the allocator not to randomly trash your memory etc.,.

[bluGill]

You misunderstand. Sure that is a part of memory safe, but why is the much larger problem of running off the end of the buffer into something else not considered a larger part. In my experience the later is a worse problem (the blame for issues goes to someone else who's code is working perfectly correct and so they spend months trying to find a logic error before someone finally looks elsewhere - often the fix is just a random fix by those who are at fault and so the team will spend months more looking before closed as "doesn't happen anymore, no idea why". Memory leaks by contrast are hard to track down, but at least they leave obvious clues and so the blame doesn't go to the wrong person.