[pron]

> Then why do my data structures detect if I go out of bounds?

I didn't mean you can't write C++ code that enforces that, I said C++ itself doesn't enforce it.

> Yes. You can clean up memory allocations automatically with destructors and have value semantics for memory that is on the heap.

Surely there are other ways to do that. E.g. Zig has defer. You can say that you may forget to write defer, which is true, but the implicitness of RAII has cause (me, at least) many problems over the years. It's a pros-and-cons thing, and Zig chooses the side of explicitness.

> Why are you talking about rust here? Focus on what I'm saying.

You're right, sorry :)

> Says who?

Says most people in the field of software correctness (and me https://pron.github.io). In the seventies, the prevalent opinion was that proofs of correctness would be the only viable approach to correctness. Since then, we've learnt two things, both of which were surprising.

The first was new results in the computational complexity of model checking (not to be confused with the computational complexity of model checkers; we're talking about the intrinsic computation complexity of the model checking problem, i.e. the problem of knowing whether a program satisfies some correctness property, regardless of how we learn that). This included results (e.g. by Philippe Schnoebelen) showing that even though there would be the reasonable expectation that language abstractions could make the problem easier, even in the worst case - it doesn't.

The second was that unsound techniques, including engineering best practices, have proven far more effective than was thought possible in the seventies. This came as quite a shock to formal methods people (most famously, Tony Hoare, who wrote a famous paper about it).

As a result, the field of software correctness has shifted its main focus from proving program correct to finding interesting confidence/cost tradeoffs to reduce the number of bugs, realising that there's no single best path to more correctness (as far as we know today).

> I'm saying that these are solved problems in C++ and I don't have to deal with them. Zig does not have destructors and move semantics.

That's true, but these are not memory safety guarantees. These are mechanisms that could mitigate bugs (though perhaps cause others), and Zig has other, different mechanisms to mitigate bugs (though perhaps cause others). E.g. see how easy it is to write a type-safe printf in Zig compared to C++, or how Zig handles various numeric overflow issues compared to C++. So it's true that C++ has some features we may find helpful that Zig doesn't and vice-versa, we can't judge which of them leads to more correct programs. All I said was that Zig offers more safety guarantees than C++, which it does.

[CyberDildonics]

Zig has defer.

And C has free, but you have to remember to use it and use it correctly every single time instead of the memory working by default with no intervention.

Says most people in the field of software correctness

Not true, the last 30 years have had much safer languages than before java, scripting languages, modern C++ and rust.

That's true, but these are not memory safety guarantees.

Pragmatically they mean you don't have to worry about bounds checking or memory deallocation and it stops being a problem. Zig doesn't have this and it doesn't have safety guarantees either.

[scrubs]

>C has free; zig has defer

But even in a c++ destructer if you forget to dealloc a private heap allocation ... then you're in the same darn place.

[CyberDildonics]

And if you divide by 0 your program still crashes. The reality is that you can use vectors for memory allocations and you never have to worry about it. If you do need to wrap resource allocation, you do it once, test it and it will probably work from then on. This is much better than the alternative of having to remember to free the memory, close the file, unlock the mutex correctly every single time you need one.

[pron]

I don't agree that "you never have to worry about it" unless you're also using smart pointers, which is rarely what I want.

I think that the alternative where all allocations and deallocations are made clear (in Zig, allocating routines are "coloured" by convention) is the better alternative, at least for the kind of low-level programming I do and for my way of thinking about low-level code.

When I write code where I don't want to see or worry about each implementation detail or see exactly where and when each operation is executed, I use Java.

[CyberDildonics]

which is rarely what I want.

If you don't want memory leaks, it probably is what you want.

There isn't a ton of difference between putting a delete in a destructor and using a smart pointer, but the best approach is to go beyond smart pointers and just use a vector, which does everything for you.

A lot of this seems like you haven't done a lot of modern C++ to see how elegant and smooth it is.

[pron]

> If you don't want memory leaks, it probably is what you want.

No, sorry.

> A lot of this seems like you haven't done a lot of modern C++ to see how elegant and smooth it is.

It's true I don't want to use modern C++ (except for certain compile-time tests), and that's because when I write low-level code what I care about the most is being able to see the machine instructions that will be emitted, especially the ones related to memory management (I don't care so much about the computational instructions; the compiler, and the CPU, will rewrite them dramatically anyway).

If I find myself needing pretty abstractions, I reconsider my use of a low-level language. That's also why I'm philosophically opposed to the concept of zero-cost abstractions. What I want from C++ that C doesn't give me is templates and some other compile-time stuff, which are much more convenient for me than C macros. I don't want any implicitness in my low-level code. Zig gives me exactly what I want from a language that specialises in low-level code.

My problem with zero-cost abstractions is that they result in code that looks high-level, while still only really having a low abstraction level (what I mean by a high or low abstraction level is the extent to which I can make local changes without influencing non-local code). The resulting code looks pretty on the page, but makes me work a lot harder to understand what is being executed and when. When I don't want to care about such details, I use Java.

Just last week I had an interesting discussion, that's somewhat similar to this, about Haskell with a colleague. He said something like, look how clearly you can see the algorithm on the screen. And I said, yes, it looks great when trying to understand what it does by reading, but it's terrible to understand when you try analysing it in the debugger or profiler. The point is that there's different kinds of information that code can communicate. Sometimes you want just the function of the algorithm to be clear and want the language to hide execution details, and sometimes you're just as interested in the execution details.

[pron]

> And C has free, but you have to remember to use it and use it correctly every single time instead of the memory working by default with no intervention.

Tangential, but memory leaks are not considered a safety issue, especially by those who do like to contrast with Rust (as it isn't prevented in Rust).

If we're talking about features that help (though not completely avoid) some bugs, you can't just consider the features C++ has and Zig doesn't, but also consider the relevant features Zig has and C++ doesn't.

Like I said, I don't know which of those two languages results in more correct programs (just as I don't know the answer for Zig vs Rust), but I do know that Zig offers more safety guanrantees than C++, and Rust offers more safety guarantees than Zig. I certainly don't claim that more safety guarantess always equals more correctness at a lower cost.

Even more tangentially, in the Java world we have this thing called "integrity" (https://openjdk.org/jeps/8305968) which is the ability of Java code to locally establish inviolate invariants that are guaranteed to hold globally (unless the application author - importantly not any library code - explicitly allows them to be violated). C++ scores quite low on the integrity front, as virtually all intended invariants can be violated without a global flag, sometimes in ways that are hard to detect. In both Rust and Zig, integrity violations are generally easier to at least detect (although in Zig they're sometimes harder to establish in the first place; this is intentional, and I don't entirely agree with the justification for that, although I can see its merits in a low-level language).

> Not true, the last 30 years have had much safer languages than before java, scripting languages, modern C++ and rust.

I don't see how that contradicts what I said, especially since language that offer even more correctness - such as Idris or ATS - have had effectively zero adoption. The languages that have succeeded are safer than C or FORTRAN, but also clearly compromise on what they offer (compared to Idris/ATS) because of costs. They very much embody the an acceptance of tradeoffs, and much of the memory safety in most safe languages is offered through GCs, that come with the cost of higher memory footprint. If anything, their growing popularity has come due to advancements in GCs.

Rust (you brought it up this time) is particularly interesting, because it offers something different than before to prevent UAF but at a higher cost than previous popular safe languages. While I don't know how popular Rust will be in the future, its current adoption is quite significantly lower than any language that's ever become popular at the same age.

> Pragmatically they mean you don't have to worry about bounds checking or memory deallocation and it stops being a problem

I haven't noticed that either one of these has "stopped being a problem", and I think that those who either sell or buy Rust do so because they believe these are still significant problems in C++ (and I would agree, except I think there are worse problems in C++ - that Rust, unfortunately, adopted - even with respect to correctness, that Zig attempts to solve).

> Zig doesn't have this and it doesn't have safety guarantees either

Zig definitely has safety guarantees around bounds and numeric overflow that C++ doesn't.

[CyberDildonics]

memory leaks are not considered a safety issue

Who told you that?

in the Java world we have this thing called "integrity"

Your claim was that zig is 'safer' than C++

Zig definitely has safety guarantees around bounds and numeric overflow that C++ doesn't.

This can be built in to a class too if someone really wants a bunch of branching in their math.

It seems like now safety is being redefined to say that memory leaks don't count and numeric overflow needs to be done like zig. If your program leaks memory, it eventually crashes if it runs indefinitely and that means you need to free memory, which means you need to free it at the right time only once.

[pron]

> Who told you that?

There is no one definitive definition of memory safety, but it generally refers to things that can lead to undefined behaviour (in the C and C++ sense), usually due to "type confusion" (or sometimes "heap pollution"), i.e. referencing an address of memory that contains data of one type as if it were another, which can happen due to both bounds or UAF violations. Memory leaks don't cause undefined behaviour.

> This can be built in to a class too if someone really wants a bunch of branching in their math.

Let me say this again: The Zig language, just like Rust, guarantees that there are no bounds violations (except in syntactically demarcated unsafe code). C++ just doesn't do that.

That is not to say that the lack of this guarantee in C++ means you can't write correct programs in C++ as easily as in Zig or in Rust, but it is, nevertheless, a difference in the guarantees made by the language.

> It seems like now safety is being redefined to say that memory leaks don't count and numeric overflow needs to be done like zig

Memory unsafety is generally considered to be some subset of undefined behaviour (possibly including all undefined behaviour). Out-of-memory and stack overflow errors are definitely problems, but as they don't cause undefined behaviour (well, depending on stack protection) they're not usually regarded in the class of properties called memory safety.

Numeric overflows, on the other hand, might also not be regarded as memory safety, but they are very much undefined behaviour in both C and C++.

[CyberDildonics]

the Zig language, just like Rust, guarantees that there are no bounds violations (except in syntactically demarcated unsafe code). C++ just doesn't do that.

You said that already, but when saying zig is safer than C++, pragmatically it isn't because C++ bounds checks in the standard library but zig can never have the automatic resource management that C++ has, and that's what people use all day every day.

[pron]

We keep talking about completely different things. If we're talking about "features that can help reduce some bug" then C++ or Rust have some that Zig doesn't and Zig has some that C++ or Rust don't. Which ends up more pragmatic is an empirical question that's hard to answer without data, but certainly focusing only on what C++ has and Zig doesn't while ignoring what Zig has that C++ doesn't is a strange way to compare things (BTW, I've been programming in C++ for almost 3 decades, and I really dislike RAII and try to avoid it).

But if we're talking about memory safety - which is something very specific - then, for whatever it's worth, Zig is more memory-safe than C++ and Rust is more memory-safe than Zig.

[uecker]

Memory leaks are also a safety issue. Especially not running destructors can be a safety issue, but also a resource leak is at least a DoS. IIRC Rust also included not having memory leaks earlier in their definition of memory safety, but dropped it later.

[pron]

The vast majority of catastrophic problems - nearly all of them, in the grand scheme of things - including those that can cause total system failure or theft of all data are not considered memory safety issues (which is one of the reasons that memory safety is overestimated or at least misunderstood, IMO, and why I prefer to talk about correctness in general). Memory safety refers to a specific kind of problems that correspond to undefined behaviour in C or C++. Memory safety issues are not neessarily any more or less sever than any other program weakness, it's just that for a long time they've been associated with low-level programming.

I'm not aware of any popular language - even a high level one - that prevents memory leaks with any kind of guarantee (although these come in different flavours too, and some kinds are prevented in Java). C/C++/Rust/Zig certainly don't.