Hacker News Reader

Comment by ifreund | Hacker News Reader

This comment is a perfect example of what Andrew was talking about here:

> Andrew: It’s funny how it just kind of changes course as the language gets taken more and more seriously. And now, all the comments are even starting to shift to kind of like the philosophy of memory safety and whether Zig is immoral.

I'd suggest you go listen to the podcast or at least read the "Zig Is Immoral and Unsafe" section of the transcript as well as the following one.

View on HN

Well, I feel pretty strongly about this issue as someone who cares about security. It is a question of ethics to me. I mean, saying Rust is unsafe because it has the unsafe block is like saying Haskell isn’t a pure language because it has IO. Yes, but it totally misses the point. The language is designed to minimize and constrain usage of unsafe features. And, outside of unsafe blocks, you know your code is safe. This is an important guarantee.

> outside of unsafe blocks, you know your code is safe

Only for some common memory mistakes. And ony if the compiler doesn't have a bug. This sounds like a nitpic, but let's be clear that Rust is not "safe" as if it was some global quality that covered all of the language.

> Only for some common memory mistakes.

Yes, I’m talking about memory safety, because memory bugs cause most vulnerabilities.

Morality and ethics seem odd to apply if a programming language should be developed, which seems to be the context Andrew was mentioning. Some use cases might apply (ex. medical devices).

I wonder if this type of debate came up when C++ was introduced amongst C developers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com