> A footgun is code that was written in a naive way, looks correct, submitted, and you find out after submitting it that it was erroneous.

You’re contradicting yourself a bit here I think. Erroneous code generally won’t compile whereas in Zig it will happily do so. Also, Zig has plenty of foot guns (eg forgetting to call defer on a deinit but even misusing noalias or having an out of bounds result in memory corruption). IMHO the zig footgun story with respect to UB behavior is largely unchanged relative to C/C++. It’s mildly better but it’s closer to C/C++ than being a safe language and UB is a huge ass footgun in any moderate complexity codebase.

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davemp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> IMHO the zig footgun story with respect to UB behavior is largely unchanged relative to C/C++

The only major UB from C that zig doesn’t address is use after free afaik. How is that largely unchanged???

Just having an actual strong type system w/o the “billion dollar mistake” is a large change.

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vlovich123 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Depends how you compile it. If you’re compiling ReleaseFast/ReleaseSmall, it’s not very different from C (modulo as you said it has some language features to make it less likely you do it):

* Double free

* Out of bounds array access

* Dereferencing null pointers

* Misaligned pointer dereference

* Accessing uninitialized memory

* Signed integer overflow

* Accessing a union field for which the active tag is something else.

	▲	dnautics 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		wow, what a list! all of these are statically analyzable using a slightly hacked zig compiler and a library! https://github.com/ityonemo/clr (Btw: you can't null pointer dereference in zig without using the navigation operator which will panic on null; you can't misalign a pointer unless you use @alignCast which will also create a panic)