[glowcoil]

I would recommend reading beyond the title of a post before leaving replies like this, as your comment is thoroughly addressed in the text of the article:

> At this point you might be wondering, isn’t this a problem in many languages? Doesn’t Java also allow data races? And yes, Java does allow data races, but the Java developers spent a lot of effort to ensure that even programs with data races remain entirely well-defined. They even developed the first industrially deployed concurrency memory model for this purpose, many years before the C++11 memory model. The result of all of this work is that in a concurrent Java program, you might see unexpected outdated values for certain variables, such as a null pointer where you expected the reference to be properly initialized, but you will never be able to actually break the language and dereference an invalid dangling pointer and segfault at address 0x2a. In that sense, all Java programs are thread-safe.

And:

> Java programmers will sometimes use the terms “thread safe” and “memory safe” differently than C++ or Rust programmers would. From a Rust perspective, Java programs are memory- and thread-safe by construction. Java programmers take that so much for granted that they use the same term to refer to stronger properties, such as not having “unintended” data races or not having null pointer exceptions. However, such bugs cannot cause segfaults from invalid pointer uses, so these kinds of issues are qualitatively very different from the memory safety violation in my Go example. For the purpose of this blog post, I am using the low-level Rust and C++ meaning of these terms.

Java is in fact thread-safe in the sense of the term used in the article, unlike Go, so it is not a counterexample to the article's point at all.

[pizlonator]

> I would recommend reading beyond the title of a post before leaving replies like this, as your comment is thoroughly addressed in the text of the article:

The title is wrong. That's important.

> Java is in fact thread-safe in the sense of the term used in the article

The article's notion of thread safety is wrong. Java is not thread safe by construction, but it is memory safe.

[ralfj]

Java also sometimes uses "memory safe" to refer to programs that don't have null pointer exceptions. So in that sense, Java isn't memory safe by construction either.

These terms are used slightly differently by different communities, which is why I discuss this point in the article. But you seem adamant that you have the sole authority for defining these terms so :shrug:

[dwattttt]

If a language is "memory safe", by some definition we expect safety from memory faults (for example, not accessing memory incorrectly).

If a language is "memory safe" but not "thread safe", is the result "the language is free from 'memory faults', unless threads are involved"?

Or to put it another way; when used however the term of art is intended, "memory safety" is meant to provide some guarantees about not triggering certain erroneous conditions. "not thread safe" seems to mean that those same erroneous conditions can be triggered by threads, which seems to amount to '"memory safety" does not guarantee the absence of erroneous memory conditions'.