I agree with the author's claim that you need thread safety for memory safety.
But I don't agree with:
> I will argue that this distinction isn’t all that useful, and that the actual property we want our programs to have is absence of Undefined Behavior.
There is plenty of undefined behavior that can't lead to violating memory safety. For example, in many languages, argument evaluation order is undefined. If you have some code like:
foo(print(1), print(2));
In some languages, it's undefined as to whether "1" is printed before "2" or vice versa. But there's no way to violate memory safety with this.
I think the only term the author needs here is "memory safety", and they correctly observe that if the language has threading, then you need a memory model that ensures that threads can't break your memory safety.
Go lacks that. It seems to be a rare problem in practice, but if you want guarantees, Go doesn't give you them. In return, I guess it gives you slightly faster execution speed for writes that it allows to potentially be torn.
But I don't agree with:
> I will argue that this distinction isn’t all that useful, and that the actual property we want our programs to have is absence of Undefined Behavior.
There is plenty of undefined behavior that can't lead to violating memory safety. For example, in many languages, argument evaluation order is undefined. If you have some code like:
In some languages, it's undefined as to whether "1" is printed before "2" or vice versa. But there's no way to violate memory safety with this.I think the only term the author needs here is "memory safety", and they correctly observe that if the language has threading, then you need a memory model that ensures that threads can't break your memory safety.
Go lacks that. It seems to be a rare problem in practice, but if you want guarantees, Go doesn't give you them. In return, I guess it gives you slightly faster execution speed for writes that it allows to potentially be torn.