| > 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 |