Comment by throwawaymaths
15 days ago
> But memory safety is not under threat here.
Note I did not say memory safety. I said security safety.
15 days ago
> But memory safety is not under threat here.
Note I did not say memory safety. I said security safety.
I don't know what "security safety" is so I must've gotten confused. If you mean type safety, then we do make sure to stay on top of that: Our JS Value is an enum that contains either stack data or a typed index that corresponds to the tag. So the Array variant holds an Array index etc. So it is not possible to take type of index and turn it into another type of index without transmute.
If you refer to referential safety, so that your reference to object X still refers to X later on, then that is indeed something we "lose" because we need to implement GC ourselves. But that wouldn't actually really meaningfully change with using pointers either, as updating pointers after a move would need to be done manually as well.
Using references is right out because we cannot explain the JavaScript memory ownership model to Rust: The two are simply not compatible. There are of course safe GC crates that give you reference APIs but they do the pointer updating manually on the inside (if they have moving GC anyway), so the situation doesn't meaningfully change.