[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.

[uecker]

Memory safety - as now being popularized by Rust in its current form - mostly corresponds to not having UB in C or C++. My point is that this not the only definition and not even the definition Rust started with.

Memory leaks are often a part of the definition of memory safety because otherwise it is trivial to fix use-after-free, i.e. simple never free the memory. Rust dropped this part because it was too hard. So in some sense the cheated a little bit.

[pron]

Well, when Rust came out I had only been programming in C and C++ for about 15, maybe 20 years, but I think that even then we generally used memory safety to refer to problems that can cause "type confusion". In any event, given that none of the languages mentioned here - C, C++, Zig, or Rust - prevent memory leaks, I don't think that the question of whether or not we include it under the umbrella of memory safety could offer insight on the interesting distinctions between these languages.

[uecker]

I think it is relevant exactly because Rust exceptionalism is based on sloppy arguments that are fallacious because they narrow down topics and definitions in some invalid way, i.e. only considered memory safety while ignoring safety in general, only considering a specific definition of memory safety, only considering the safe subset of Rust, only accepting language-level safety, etc. until at the end it looks that Rust is extremely different to other languages while it is just some incremental step.

[pron]

I completely agree, but given that even in Java, which eliminates the memory leaks Rust doesn't, programs still have bugs and security vulnerabilities, I don't think it's about what is and isn't memory safety. Most of the software that runs the world has been written in memory-safe languages for a very long time. It's more about understanding the significance and role of memory safety. With that comes the insight that it isn't binary and, while important (out-of-bounds access in C and C++ is, as far as we know empirically, one of the leading causes of security vulnerabilities), eliminating it has both a finite benefit and a cost that need to be considered.

[uecker]

I agree.