alt Hacker NewsSo the intersting question: are we long term safer with "simpler" closer to hardware memory unsafe(ish) environments like Zig, or is the memory safe but more abstract feature set of languages like Rust still the winning direction?
If a hypothetical build step is "look over this program and carfully examine the bounds of safety using your deep knowledge of the OS, hardware, language and all the tools that come along with it", then a less abstract environment might be at an overall advantage. In a moment, I'll close this comment and go back to writing Rust. But if I had the time (or tooling) to build something in C and test it as thoroughly as say, SQLite [1], then I might think harder about the tradeoffs.
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They're great at Python and Javascript which have lots of tooling. My idea was to make X-to-safe-lang translators, X initially being Python and Javascript. Let the tools keep generating what they're good at. The simpler translators make it safe and fast.
If translated to C or Java, we can use decades worth of tools for static analysis and test generation. While in Python and Javascript, it's easier to analyze and live debug by humans.
Multiple wins if the translators can be built.
What about this article raises this question? If anything, this article makes it pretty clear that memory safe languages are a win. It seems like a serious disadvantage to require a nondeterministic program to evaluate your code's safety.