[hitekker]

If you one day write a blog, I would want to subscribe.

Your writing feels accessible. I find it makes complex topics approachable. Or at least, it gives me a feel of concepts that I would otherwise have no grasp on. Other online writing tends to be permeated by a thick lattice of ideology or hyper-technical arcanery that inhibits understanding.

[Ygg2]

> Your writing feels accessible. I find it makes complex topics approachable

Yeah. By omitting a large swath of nuance. It reeks of "you can approximate cow with a sphere the size of Jupiter". It's baffling ludicrous.

Any rhetorical device that equates Java/C# (any memory safe Turing language ) safety with C is most likely a fallacy.

[pron]

> Any rhetorical device that equates Java/C# (any memory safe Turing language ) safety with C is most likely a fallacy.

I agree, but I didn't do any of that. If anything my point was that 1. safety is clearly not a binary thing and no one really treats it as such (even those who claim it is a binary distinction) and 2. that trying to extrapolate from one language to another based on choosing some property that we think is the most relevant one may be assuming that which we seek to prove.

Saying that C, C++, and Zig are "the same" because they all make fewer guanratees than Rust is as silly as saying C, C++, Zig, and Rust are the same because they all offer fewer guarantees than ATS, or that Rust and Java are the same because they offer similar guarantees but with very different complexity costs.

Also, the focus on memory safety is justified because of the security bugs it causes, but the two major kinds of unsafety (out-of-bounds access and use-after free) aren't equally dangerous, and Rust pays most of its complexity cost to prevent the less dangerous of the two (https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html). There's even more nuance here, because some techniques focus on reducing the risk of exploitable use-after-free bugs without preventing it or even making it easier to detect at all (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~tmj32/papers/docs/ainsworth20-sp.p...).

It's all a matter of degree, both when it comes to the risk as well as to the cost of avoiding it. Not much here, beyond the very basics, is simple or obvious.

If you want to read some more even nuanced things I've written about software correctness, you can find some old stuff here: https://pron.github.io

[hudon]

I interpreted his post as saying it's not binary safe/unsafe, but rather a spectrum, with Java safer than C because of particular features that have pros and cons, not because of a magic free safe/unsafe switch. He's advocating for more nuance, not less.

[Ygg2]

Yeah, it's not binary; it's just a step function. /s

No, it's as close to binary as you can get. Is your only source of Undefined Behavior FFI specially marked functions and/or packages? Have you checked data races for violating thread safety invariants? If yes - You're safe.

Allow a bit of unsafety into the system, like Go, and the unsafety can creep into your ecosystem. See https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2025/07/24/memory-safety.html

Is Go in mostly safer than C++? Maybe. But you can never prove that about either of them. So while you may pretend one is safer than the other, it's a bit like picking which boat is taking on more water.

Can you prove Rust code is safe? Well there is the simple way - no unsafe. But what about unsafe blocks? Yes, you can prove it for them as well. If the unsafe code block is it will note safety invariants and why are they preserved by unsafe block. Can this be practically done? Depends on the crate, but with enough effort, yes.

[lossolo]

> Is Go in mostly safer than C++? Maybe

Maybe? You forgot /s there? Asking if Go is mostly safer than C++ is like asking if child proof caps are mostly safer than mason jars for medicine.

> https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2025/07/24/memory-safety.html

Can you show RCE using this? Because, to this day, no one has been able to show me a reasonable program that someone would write and that would result in RCE from "Go memory unsafety" presented in this article. Meanwhile, I can show you thousands of examples and CVEs of how you can easily get RCE using C++.

> Can you prove Rust code is safe? Well there is the simple way - no unsafe. But what about unsafe blocks? Yes, you can prove it for them as well. If the unsafe code block is it will note safety invariants and why are they preserved by unsafe block. Can this be practically done? Depends on the crate, but with enough effort, yes.

You can’t prove Rust code "safe" in the absolute. Safety guarantees apply to safe Rust under the language’s (still evolving) rules, and even then the compiler/backend must uphold them. We still hit unsoundness[1] and miscompiles in safe code (equal pointers comparing unequal... [2]), and the official unsafe code guidelines are not a finalized spec. So documenting invariants in unsafe helps a lot, but it’s not a formal proof, especially across crates and compiler versions.

1. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/107975

2. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/labels/I-unsound

On the safety spectrum: C/C++ -> Zig -> Go -> Rust

[Ygg2]

> Maybe? You forgot /s there?

Neither are memory safe, so if you're going by the "safe in practice" definition then it has to be verified experimentally. Hence - maybe.

> Can you show RCE using this?

RCE and Undefined Behavior are two intersecting sets. Not all UB is RCE, but what all UBs are hard to track bugs that happen at most inconvenient times.

> You can’t prove Rust code "safe" in the absolute.

Sure you can't prove that any Turing machine has some property X or not. But Rust Belt (pdf https://hal.science/hal-01633165v2/document) is proof that safety of safe blocks is extensible and can apply to safe interfaces encapsulating unsafe well.

> We still hit unsoundness[1] and miscompiles in safe code (equal pointers comparing unequal... [2])

Your [1] is an LLVM bug.

As for [2] yeah there ARE bugs, wrong flags, bus they are fixing it and triggering most requires stuff like nightly, hitting bugs in specific hardware/LLVM, or very contrived trait constructions.

I mean sure by that token nothing is ever safe, reality is crooked, coins have three sides, and white is black, so traffic crossing are mass hallucinations.

> On the safety spectrum: C/C++ -> Zig -> Go -> Rust

Honestly it goes like this. C -> C++ --> Zig ------> Go --------------------------------------------------------------------------> Rust --> Ada Core

[lossolo]

> Neither are memory safe, so if you're going by the "safe in practice" definition then it has to be verified experimentally. Hence - maybe.

This is a ridiculous claim that it’s only "maybe". It’s so obvious, it’s like saying cars are not safe to drive, but if you use seatbelts and have airbags, then MAYBE they’re safer. I have verified this experimentally, like millions of other people. This argument is totally in bad faith, given the sea of CVEs caused by memory safety issues in C++ versus the almost virtually non-existent problem in safe Go in practice.

> Your [1] is an LLVM bug.

Yes, unfixed for two years. I don’t have this bug in Go, for example, so why, as a Rust user, should I care whose fault it is? If you buy a car and the engine doesn’t work as it should in some cases, do you accept the manufacturer saying, "Well, that’s the engine manufacturer’s issue, so all is OK"?

> As for [2] yeah there ARE bugs, wrong flags, bus they are fixing it and triggering most requires stuff like nightly, hitting bugs in specific hardware/LLVM, or very contrived trait constructions.

That went fast from "proven to be safe" to "yeah there are bugs".

> Honestly it goes like this. C -> C++ --> Zig ------> Go --------------------------------------------------------------------------> Rust --> Ada Core

And how did you arrive at these numbers of "—"? Did you "verify them experimentally"? Because I claim otherwise:

C --> C++ ----> Zig --------------> Go ----> Rust --> Ada Core

can you prove me wrong or prove you are right? You can't. It seems we can only agree on the ranking of the languages.

[hitekker]

^ This comment demonstrates what I meant by "thick lattice of ideology"

[pron]

Thank you!

I did have one once (https://pron.github.io) but I don't know how accessible it is :) (two post series are book-length)