You mention that Pascal is almost as safe as Rust. This comes as a great surprise to me, because I was under the impression that Pascal and C are very similar.
(Though I hear the strings, at least, know their own size!)
(Though I hear the strings, at least, know their own size!)
I didn't really have a need to work with pointers and do pointer math in Pascal, because language itself provided facilities to work with heap objects safely.
Also standard Pascal compiler added array bounds safety and many other checks, and you would easily find these errors during program execution (there wont be a silent exception).
Also because Pascal compiler is LL(1) single pass compiler, you could easily do a cycle of: edit code, compile (<1 second on 333Mhz Pentium-II), and run.
That compiler enabled developer experience of like modern Python/Javascript
Unlike C++ which spent enormous time evaluating macros, compiling, linking, etc
Is this the same as how in C, as long as you follow very simple convention with malloc() and free() you won't have memory safety problems?
if you were to pass reference around, then compiler would warn about potentially dangerous Free.
I don't remember ever seeing Pascal code where you received raw pointer and then directly casted it to your object type for example. Pascal has very powerful and expressive type system
eg I use C a lot and find myself referencing array index [0] a lot, in pascal arrays starts at [1] if not specifically defined so I know this from experience, frustratingly I have a different problem in C which will either return random data or crash if writing.
Pascal also avoids buffer overrun errors on strings, because strings are dynamically resized as necessary.
You can also avoid having to free objects if you declare them as implementing a certain Interface (I forget the exact one). They will automatically be freed when the number of references drops to 0.