Can D "prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety"?

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Tuesday, 23 February 2016 at 04:28:14 UTC, mahdi wrote:
> A selling point of Rust language is that it "prevents 
> segfaults, and guarantees thread safety". Is there a library in 
> D language which provides same features?

The core d runtime (including the garbage collector) does such 
things.

GC, when used pervasively, eliminates use-after-free bugs. Array 
bounds checking eliminates buffer overflow bugs. Automatic 
initialization of variables covers random pointers that way.

Those are the sources of most security problems in C code (though 
not most segfaults - null is still there, but null usually isn't 
a security problem on desktop and server hardware (idk about 
phones)).

.net, Java, D, javascript, python, the list goes on, these 
languages all do pretty good jobs at taking care of this class of 
bug. It isn't something unique to Rust. (though garbage 
collection is typically a major part of the standard solution, 
and Rust does that differently, that's why it is interesting, not 
that it solves these problems, but that it does it a bit 
differently than the accepted mainstream solution.)

Thread safety is a bit trickier but D's use of default 
thread-local data tries to attack it too.


The problem with D's solution is too many people recommend 
turning them off in the name of performance benchmarks :(