[throwaway82652]

That comment is definitely out of line and trolling, but the author's attitude towards safety and security is still incredibly bad. Two wrongs don't make a right. I'm dismayed to see more new languages copying the safety and security features of C (i.e. nothing).

[ddevault]

Hare has significantly more safety and security features than C. Bounds-checked slices, no uninitialized data, mandatory error handling, nullable pointer types, and others still. What it lacks that Rust users object to is a borrow checker.

[CJefferson]

You don't need a borrow checker -- there are many ways to avoid use-after-free bugs. They don't in Java, or Haskell, or Python, to name 3 languages I work in sometimes.

However, I really do think for a new "systems language" nowadays, you do want to look at how major security holes occur in practice, and have a good story on how users should avoid them.

[throwaway82652]

You should be implementing a borrow checker or something like it. It's irresponsible not to do that. I'm serious about this. We know how to totally stop most use-after-free bugs during static analysis now, this is a tool that can be implemented in any language, so people should just do it. If you ask me the status quo moved a long time ago. This has nothing to do with Rust.

Also I was wrong before and you were out of line. Matthew wasn't trolling, he never said you should be held criminally liable. You just made that criminal part up for no reason. Anyone should be held socially liable and shamed if their project has bad security and they refuse to fix it after they knew about it. I think you would even agree with that.

[mplanchard]

I think “incredibly bad” is overstating things quite a bit. Safety isn’t an all-or-nothing game. If it were, Rust would be useless because it’s not Ada or another formally verifiable language.