alt Hacker NewsWell, "safety" is a lot of things so you have to be a bit more specific than that about your use-cases. And I can't really answer it either way - I think WvO has to chime in about that himself - but I can point to some things that might give you some idea of what to expect. Here's what WvO wrote a few weeks ago when he shared Goose on twitter:
> Goose: my latest programming language. Safer, faster and less memory than Rust/C++ for algorithms where tightly packed, flat data structures matter.
> It can represent more kinds of data structures as flat, pointer-free bytes than any language I know.
https://xitter.cf/wvo/status/2107979660558766351
So one way to answer might be: how often do you reach for unsafe when using Rust? If you don't I guess Rust is safer. If you do… it gets trickier.
As for UB, I guess you could try looking through the spec and/or the reference? Like, the code is mostly generated by Claude after WvO wrote a specification. If it were anyone else I'd be worried, but given WvO's cv I actually suspect that means the spec leaves basically no ambiguity.
However, Goose compiles to C. Does that by definition mean UB sneaks in, or is there a "UB free" C subset? I don't write C, so I don't really know.
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I guess my question is if you can trigger UB in regular Goose and if you can, would it be considered a bug. I realize that this doesn't necessarily have a simple yes or no answer but I still think it'd help to know if Goose is more on the C++ side or the Rust side.
The complete omission of UB in the README could be one of two things. Either that the topic is not important or that it is considered a given and not worth mentioning.
Certainly there's a UB free C subset ... everything specified by the C Standard or designated as implementation-defined is UB free by definition.
UB in C potentially destroys the universe so C programmers do their best to avoid it. A backend that generates C code is a lot more easily constrained than arbitrary manual code. While it's conceivable that a C backend could produce UB code, it would be a severe bug and isn't likely. It most certainly isn't "by definition" ... that suggests some serious conceptual error.