D not considered memory safe

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, July 6, 2024 5:07:32 AM MDT Sebastian Nibisz via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On Saturday, 6 July 2024 at 00:21:32 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> > On 7/5/2024 12:42 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> >> Yes, I'm aware. I purposely did not apply `@safe`. D is not a
> >> memory safe language, you have to request it.
> >
> > D is memory safe if you type in "safe:" and use the gc.
> >
> > https://dlang.org/spec/memory-safe-d.html
>
> Seriously? Any language is safe in this case, you just need to
> write safe code.

The point is that D provides checks for memory safety if you choose to
enable them. It requires using @safe to explicitly say that you want a piece
of code to have those checks done, so the checks are not on by default, but
it _does_ provide such checks, whereas a language like C/C++ does not. D has
also been designed in a way to try to eliminate a lot of the undefined and
unsafe behaviors that you have to be careful to avoid in C/C++. Barring
compiler bugs or the programmer screwing up with @trusted, @safe code in D
is guaranteed to be memory safe, whereas in C/C++, the language is not
designed to avoid memory safety issues, and it's entirely up to the
programmer to use the language in a way that doesn't have memory safety
problems.

Making @safe the default for D would have the benefit of making it so that
you get those memory safety checks by default, but it doesn't actually make
the language itself safer. It has the same tools either way.

- Jonathan M Davis