On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).
On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?
What memory-safe systems programming languages are out there, besides Rust?
Here are a few:
https://dlang.org/
https://ziglang.org/
https://odin-lang.org/
Zig is better than C, but still a far stretch from the memory safety of Rust: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/
Also Swift!
Languages with GC
I appreciate your answer, but I mentioned systems programming, because I was more interested in languages that do not rely on a garbage collector.
To play devil’s advocate, most systems programming can be done even with a garbage collector. Midori was a project to build an operating system on a variant of C#, and although the garbage collector did impose technical difficulties, it wasn’t a dealbreaker. Go isn’t usable everywhere Rust is, but it can in fact be used for many things that previously would have been considered “systems” niches (which is part of why there was a somewhat prevalent misconception in the early days of Rust that they were similar languages). Prominent D developers have defended D’s garbage collector (even though it’s technically optional). Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, used to express great confidence that C++ would one day have a garbage collector.
…but you’re right, Rust and its rise in popularity (and, conversely, the C++ community’s resistance to adopt anything with garbage collection) have definitely narrowed the common definition of “systems programming” to exclude anything with a “thick” runtime.
I enjoyed the facts spit above.
Huh, I totally missed that my bad
Wasn’t Go designed to be a memory safe systems programming language? I haven’t really used it enough to see if it holds true, though.
Go is almost memory safe, but it does suffer from an issue with its thick pointers (type + address) that can cause race conditions to misrepresent the type of a data structure. This can lead to true segmentation faults and out of bound memory accesses, though it will probably be quite difficult (but not impossible) to exploit them.
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Segfaults aren’t particularly dangerous. They mean the problem was caught. The program usually just exits.
Failing to segfault, thereby allowing a bad memory access, is where the real trouble happens.
No, if you try to index something out-of-bounds it will panic, which is not a memory-safety gap.
I’m very flaky here, as rust is the big one, but I think zig and/or nim might be
Zig is better than C, but still a far stretch from memory safe: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/ I think Nim is better because it uses a garbage collector and doesn’t have any pointer arithmetic, but I couldn’t find as much on the topic.