Comment by tuetuopay

My Go is a bit rusty (pun intended), so I may have misremembered, especially with the pointer offsets. (just googled it, I did remember it, sorry for the confusion).

>> It's absolutely possible to reinterpret memory the wrong way. > Again, without the unsafe package? How?

Again my go is rusty, but I saw quite a bit of shenanigans in go with pointer casting from what's essentially a collection of void*. However perhaps those casts blow up at runtime? I'm too used to rust where it's explicit where it'll blow up.

>> It's absolutely possible to dereference nil. > Yeah, but that's safe defined behavior in go equivalent to "unwrap"ing a None option in rust. It reliably crashes. It's not like C where it's undefined behavior and you might crash of you might just corrupt random memory or have the optimizer make your code do something even stranger.

Agreed. I conflated "safety" and "robustness" here. The existence of nil is a thorn in the language.

Thanks for the corrections!