Comment by Mordak
2 days ago
The article points out what I think is the crux of the discussion: With Fil-C they become crashes. Errors manifest at runtime, not at compile time.
I realized some time ago when I talk to people about rust, I don't really mention memory / thread safety in a security context, I mention them in a reliability context. Compile-time checks mean I basically never spend time debugging runtime crashes, and generally can count on the compiler to catch memory and thread safety issues before the program ever runs, and this saves me time and aggravation in production. I care about security, but I care more about reliability, and rust compile-time checks mean my software is reliable in a way that runtime-checked languages just aren't.
This applies to lots of languages. Every time I hit a runtime crash in python, or ruby, or js I die a little inside. Even though they are memory-safe because they're garbage collected, I still waste time debugging runtime errors.
No comments yet
Contribute on Hacker News ↗