> But you did the same thing when,

I do not go around posting "omg Rust is SO MUCH BETTER than zig or fil-c, which are TRASH." I talk about engineering tradeoffs, and what matters to me personally. I do not say "if you use Zig, you are a bad person." I am not saying that any comparison is bad. I am saying that the way that the comparison is presented is bad. That is different.

> you declared the exact compromise that Rust makes "table stakes"

Table stakes for me.

> Zig improves on C's memory safety when it comes to spatial safety,

I agree that it's an improvement on C!

> yet you excluded it.

I said that it is not pursuing a design that I personally find compelling enough to use to write software. That doesn't mean that I think it's worthless. This whole thing started off with me talking about how much I respect the Zig project! Yet you're trying to turn this into something where I'm talking shit. I presented a specific technical tradeoff that is important to me. That is very different.

> You're trying to draw some hard line on a spectrum that passes exactly between Rust and Zig, and I'm trying to say that that line isn't there (your attempt at a definition of delineating safe and unsafe code also applies to C)

I don't believe you've shown that. And my "attempt" does apply to C: it fails the bar, because it does not delineate between a safe subset and an unsafe superset.

> you may argue that you're only talking about "memory safety" and not correctness in general,

I am in fact talking about "memory safety" and have been this whole time, yes.

> what gives memory safety value is that violations are causes of many dangerous vulnerabilities; but once, say, Java eliminates all of them, 100% of bugs/vulnerability - which are still numerous - will be caused by other problems, all potentially avoidable with ATS, so why isn't ATS table stakes?

This is just an entirely different question. Yes, there are other forms of safety that are important too. That's just not what we're talking about here.

> Table stakes for me.

Ok, so if you meant "table stakes" as an expression of a personal preference and suitability to the programs you write without making an unsupported universal claim such as "this leads to better correctness" or "the price is almost always worth it" then we're good :)

> Yes, there are other forms of safety that are important too.

The thing is that they can be at least equally important, and some affordances for memory safety could potentially _harm_ them. To me, Rust offers little safety in the programs I want to write in a low-level language, but the price it charges in language complexity and implicitness ends up in a negative balance (I can't prove it, of course; as I said, software correctness is very complicated, and some of the greatest researchers in the field were proven wrong on how to best achieve it).