[dnautics]

actually that's not true at all. Zig offers you some more safety than C. And it also affords you a compiler architecture and stdlib that is so well designed you could probably bolt on memory safety relatively easily as a 3rd party static checker

https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

[simonask]

"More safety than C" is an incredibly low bar. These are hygiene features, which is great, but Rust offers a paradigm shift. It's an entirely different ballpark.

[dnautics]

negative. For example bounds checking is turned on by default in Zig, which prevents classes of overflow safety errors.

[simonask]

I don't think you've necessarily understood the scope and impact of the borrow checker. Bounds checking is just a sane default (hygiene), not a game changer.

[dnautics]

I mean, I'm the author of this?

https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

so yes, I understand that it's important. It doesn't need to be in the compiler though? I think it's likely the case that you also don't need to have annotations littering the language.

[simonask]

I wish you good luck! Successive attempts to achieve similar levels of analysis without annotations have failed in the C++ space, but I look forward to reading your results.

[dnautics]

yeah afaik you cant easily intercept c++ at a meaningful IR in the same way as you can zig. Zig's AIR is almost perfect for this kind of thing.