Flutterby™! : Memory safety is a small part of safety

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Memory safety is a small part of safety

2025-11-20 01:59:18.495222+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

I've been thinking a lot about what language I want to use next. I've been mostly working in Objective-C for the past... egads... too many years, and while there are aspects of the language I like, it is not terribly performant in message dispatching, and introspection is possible, but can be ugly.

C and C++ are awesome for so many things, but there's always the memory safety thing lying over them, and C++ in particular is annoying as hell cross-platform: What version of Boost is on this platform? What compiler semantics have changed such that there's now some obscure template matching error that's preventing code that compiled fine a decade ago from working now?

Swift is...

I've done a little bit in Rust, and looked a little bit at Zig and Go, and all of them feel like it's hard to really express an idea in them. Which, I mean, on the one hand is kind of the point, they're about straitjackets, on the other hand I wonder how much value the straitjacket has.

TARmageddon (CVE-2025-62518): RCE Vulnerability Highlights the Challenges of Open Source Abandonware is, on the one hand, about trying to do responsible disclosure on a package that's been forked a gazillion times and is no longer maintained, on the other hand it's also about how memory safety is only a small portion of safety.

nullagent @nullagent@partyon.xyz who has "...a grey-beard rant about how Rust give developers a false sense of security.".

[ related topics: Free Software History Work, productivity and environment ]

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