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by JoelJacobson 7 days ago
I'm not a native English speaker, I know "memory safe" has a precise technical meaning, but the word "safe" still feels a bit strange to me given that a memory-safety bug can make the program crash at run-time.

Sure, Fil-C prevents the bug from possibly being exploited, which is a huge improvement. But crashing can be a DoS attack, and if running a mission-critical system, it might not be an acceptable outcome.

I just feel the already very good presentation could have been made much better if it had put more weight on explaining these trade-offs.

1 comments

Even in memory safe Rust, out-of-bounds array access also results in crashes.

The whole point of memory safety is that bugs can not be exploited. A memory safe program does not mean a crash safe program.