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And we have the core dumps to prove it.

When any Costco sells a desktop ten thousand times faster than the one I started on, we can afford runtime sanity checks. We don’t have to keep living like this, with stacks that randomly explode.



I don't know what line of work you're in, but I use a desktop orders of magnitude faster than my first computer also, and image processing, compilation, rendering, and plenty of other tasks aren't suddenly thousands of times faster. Not to mention that memory safety is just one type of failure in a cornucopia of potential logical bugs. In addition, I like core dumps because the failure is immediate, obvious, and fatal. Finally, stacks don't "randomly explode." You can overflow a stack in other languages also, I really just don't see what you're getting at.


> Not to mention that memory safety is just one type of failure in a cornucopia of potential logical bugs.

You can die of multiple illnesses so there's no point in developing treatment for any particular one of them.

> I like core dumps because the failure is immediate, obvious, and fatal.

Core dumps provide a terrible debugging experience, as the failure root cause is often disjoint from the dump itself. Not to mention that core dumps are but one outcome of memory errors, with other funnier outcomes such as data corruption and exploitable vulnerabilities as likely.

Lastly, memory safe languages throw an exception or panic on out of bound access, which can be made as immediate and fatal as core dumps. And much more obvious to debug, since you can trust that the cause starts indeed at the point of failure


I don’t mean a call stack, I mean “stack” in the LAMP sense—the kernel, drivers, shared libraries, datastores, applications, and display servers we try to depend on.


I dunno, my computers seems to keep running slower and slower despite being faster and faster. I blame programmers increasingly using languages with more and more guardrails which are slower. I'd rather have a few core dumps and my fast computer back.




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