Comment by gf000
4 days ago
Silent corruption of unrelated data structures in memory. Segfault only happens if you are accessing memory outside the program's valid address space. But it can just as easily happen that you corrupt something in the runtime, and the GC will run havoc, or cause a million other kind of very hard to debug errors.
> But it can just as easily happen that you corrupt something in the runtime, and the GC will run havoc
I would love to see an example of this, if you don't mind. My understanding is that the GC in Go actively prevents against what you write. There is no pointer arithmetic in the language. The worst that can happen is a segfault or data corruption due to faulty locking like the Java example I gave above.
https://lobste.rs/c/vq3zn0
Here is a thread discussing it, but there are multiple posts/comment threads on the topic. In short, slices are fat pointers in the language, and data races over them can cause other threads to observe the slice in an invalid state, which can be used to access memory it shouldn't be able to.