Providing implicit conversion of - memory-safety

[Nick Treleaven]

On Monday, 22 January 2024 at 19:11:50 UTC, Siarhei Siamashka 
wrote:
> On Monday, 22 January 2024 at 16:39:10 UTC, Nick Treleaven 
> wrote:
>> Memory safety issues are a worse class of bug than arithmetic 
>> bugs. The latter are reproducible if you feed them the same 
>> input.
>
> Memory safety bugs are reproducible with the tools like 
> `valgrind`.

Not necessarily, valgrind can execute programs too slowly for 
human input, so anything that relies on timing is difficult to 
reproduce. It also uses far more memory, it could be too much 
memory for the system.

> Whereas arithmetic overflow bugs are a real PITA to debug. 
> Assuming that the incorrect results are even noticed.

You're talking about debugging, whereas I'm saying you often 
don't even have a chance to *notice* memory-safety bugs, because 
they might not even occur on the development system, only on the 
production system.

And even if you know there's a memory-safety problem, you can't 
easily narrow down  where it is (without language support for 
memory-safety). With arithmetic problems it's far easier to 
narrow down which code is causing them.

But I'm strongly in favour of catching any bugs at compile-time 
(and have been since before I discovered D). I just object to 
anyone trying to downgrade the importance of automated 
memory-safety checking.