That seems contrasted by Rob Pike's statement in 2012 in the linked presentation being one of the places where it's called "not purely memory safe". That would have been early, and Go is not called memory safe then. It seems like calling Go memory safe is a more recent thing rather than a historical thing.

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phire 5 days ago | parent [-]

Keep in mind that the 2012 presentations dates to 10 months after Rust's first release, and its version of "Memory Safety" was collecting quite a bit of attention. I'd argue the definition was already changing by this point. It's also possible that Go was already discovering their version of "Memory Safety" just wasn't safe enough.

If you go back to the original 2009 announcement talk, "Memory Safety" is listed as an explicit goal, with no carveouts:

"Safety is critical. It's critical that the language be type-safe and that it be memory-safe."

"It is important that a program not be able to derive a bad address and just use it; That a program that compiles is type-safe and memory-safe. That is a critical part of making robust software, and that's just fundamental."

https://youtu.be/rKnDgT73v8s?t=463

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SkiFire13 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Rust's first release, and its version of "Memory Safety" was collecting quite a bit of attention

Note that this was not Rust's first stable release, but it's first public release. At the time it was still changing a lot and still had "garbage collected" types.

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phire 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, it was the 0.1 release. I can't remember exactly when Rust entered the general "programming language discourse" on hackernews and /r/programming, but it was somewhere around here. I'm sure the people behind Go would have known about it by this point in time.

And while rust did have optional "garbage collected pointers", it's important to point out that it is not a garbage collected language. The ownership system and borrow checker were very much front-and-centre for the 0.1 release, it was what everyone was talking about.

Actually, my memory is that while the language had syntax to declare garbage collected pointers, it wasn't actually hooked up to a proper garbage collector. It was always more of a "we are reserving the syntax and we will hook it up when needed", and it turns out the ownership system was powerful enough that it was never needed.

	▲	SkiFire13 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Actually, my memory is that while the language had syntax to declare garbage collected pointers, it wasn't actually hooked up to a proper garbage collector. It was always more of a "we are reserving the syntax and we will hook it up when needed", and it turns out the ownership system was powerful enough that it was never needed. AFAIK it was just an `Rc`/`Arc` with the possibility of upgrading it to an actual GC in the future.

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codys 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a very good point on the timing. Thanks for adding that extra info.