Comment by pcwalton
10 years ago
> What I'm trying to say is that I don't want memory safety because it would improve my daily programming experience (in fact possibly the reverse would be true)
I think you underestimate how much time is saved by not having to deal with these issues. Programming in C or C++ is frequently an exercise in writing the code, seeing a crash due to a memory safety problem, debugging it, and then repeating until you see anything resembling a working program. Writing in a memory-safe language lets you skip all that startup friction and go straight to "something resembling a working program".
I don't know, I don't think I spend even a couple of hours per month inside a debugger. I doubt my colleagues do either. Usually I write code for 1-2 weeks, then spend one day trying to get it to compile then one or two days debugging it, but most of my debugging sessions is trailing logs and trying to figure out what went wrong with in complex state machines (i.e. the business logic, not the language/infrastructure 'overhead').
Also, many of the data structures I deal with are highly intrusive (as in an object belonging at the same time in multiple containers) and short of full GC I doubt it would be easy to guarantee MS.
Then again, possibly I'm not representative of the typical C++ programmer.