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Comment by ranger_danger | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this time could be used to consider memory safety much more seriously.

EDIT: Would love to know why people are so angry about that?

The issue that caused this to be voted down is often seen as a memory safety solution (not something I personally 100% agree with, but thats a broad view). And the rest of this release includes other memory safety work. And it was voted down and delayed for apparent political reasons (again not a view I agree with).

So most people will read your view as hypocritical/misinformed.

It could also be read as a straight up attack. Basically, a way of saying “why not follow Rust“ without having to say the word Rust.

I think it was a fair question. As someone who doesn’t follow C++ I really don’t know what else was in the proposal. It’s nice to hear there is memory safety stuff.

The memory-safety-relevant parts of the proposal could be salvaged without keeping contracts more broadly, by saying that the relevant behaviors (like indexing past the end of a std::vector) cause program termination in hardened builds. I'm sure it's more complicated than this but I don't think much more.

More generally, the C++ committee has had a really hard time agreeing on memory-safety stuff because there are a lot of different constituencies with completely different priorities (especially whether they're using it for greenfield vs. legacy vs. something in between), and the incentive is to make proposals sound good to everyone at the expense of actually being coherent.

Memory safety was solved in 1959 with the invention of lisp

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