Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I agree that it is a bad idea to describe rust this way but they likely meant memory safety as used in https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2025/07/24/memory-safety.html . Meaning that shared mutable is thread unsafe, I am unsure about Java and JavaScript but I think that almost every language on the popular memory safe list fails this test.

Again the statement is probably still untrue and bad marketing, but I suspect this kind of reasoning was behind it

Of course Rust technically fails too since `unsafe` is a language feature





I don't have an issue with `unsafe` - Java has the mythical unsafe object, C# has it's own unsafe keyword, Python has ffi, etc. The title of that blog post - that there is no memory safety without thread safety - is not quite true and it acknowledges how Java, C#, and Go have strong memory safety while not forbidding races. Even the "break the language" framing seems like special pleading; I'd argue that Java permitting reading back a sheared long (64-bit) integer due to a data race does not break the language the same way writing to a totally unintended memory area or smashing the stack does, and that this distinction is useful. Java data races that cause actual exploitable vulnerabilities are very, very rare.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: