Memory safety absolutists

I’ve only heard the woke/anti woke framing from Lunduke on the right, and a few Rust fanatics on the left. Both parties and their sympathizers want to fit the Holy Language war into the Culture war™

I do. Not for any technical reason, but because the Rust evangelists seem ready to burn me at the stake if i don't agree that memory safety is the one true god and Rust is it's prophet.

They hurt the language adoption more than they help it.

So which layer should we care about? All of them? Yes, if we want the most safety.

I will give you an example of how I can use memory incorrectly in "safe" rust. Let's say I have an integer that contains my age. Now I forget what the number was used for and I use it as shoe size. I have now used memory (the content of the variable) as something it was not intended for. Maybe you think this example is silly, but what is really the difference between using a float pointer as an int pointer and using age as shoe size? Another thing we could do is to use an index for one array as an index for another array. That's an example of using a pointer as the wrong type because an index is just a relative pointer.

So if we want to care about all layers of memory safety then we have to care about not using ages as shoe sizes and indexes with the wrong arrays. "Memory safe" languages usually don't help us with that and therefore they don't give us total memory safety. I think "memory safety" is not a very useful term because all data in a program lies in memory and basically all bugs have something to do with using that memory in wrong ways.

You could even use Rust alongside Fil-C to ensure the unsafe blocks are safe. It would even be interesting to turn off some of Fil-C's expensive protections in the safe parts of the Rust code, making an average-of-both-worlds sort of solution.

What I do care about are C and C++, these two absolute garbage languages (though I do have a lot of love for C, you can both love and hate something).

Tools like Fil-C, hardened mallocs like SlimGuard, and other "make C safe" solutions all sacrifice absurd amounts of performance because these two moronic languages refuse to have a proper slice/span type.

Use-after-free and double-free are serious problems but they're a spec of dust compared to missing bounds-checks. The low-hanging fruit is right there for the picking but everyone is worried about how to reach the fruits at the top.

C++ only now in C++26 is finally adding bounds checks to the [] operator on std::span and (hilariously) is also finally adding the now mostly redundant .at() method which should have been there from day one.

Clang added -fbounds-safety which is a feature that should have existed for a long time and serves as a decent stop-gap to a proper slice type. But of course, since it's not standardized, most people won't use it.

What these two languages have taught us is that if you want to produce utter garbage you should make it an ISO standard.

Me, personally, I find this whole discussion on memory safety amusing. Missing bounds checks are by far the biggest source of vulnerabilities and they're a problem in exactly 2 languages and those 2 languages have outright refused to do anything about it for decades.

But hey, even in memory safe languages you have frameworks like log4j that had remote code execution from a format string as a feature. Is the problem memory safety specifically, or this utter cavalier attitude towards security?

I'm not even suggesting something dumb like "you just gotta get good at C and then you won't have any vulnerabilities". Humans are fallible, which is why we delegate what we can to machines. I'm just pointing out the utter lack of care. People just don't care.

At least do the bare minimum of effort like, I don't know, not make remote code execution a feature tied to format strings. Or provide a slice type in your language and string manipulation functions in your standard library that make use of it, preferably 20 years ago.