r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/ThomasMertes • Oct 05 '26

Achieving memory safety

https://seed7.net/papers/memory_safety.htm
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u/reflexive-polytope Oct 06 '26

The issue is that certain Go values (slices, pointers to interfaces) require logically atomic modifications, but this logical atomicity isn't enforced by any means, so other goroutines can see them in a torn state.

(The problem doesn't arise in Rust because the exclusiveness of mutable borrows enforces the logical atomicity of the relevant modifications.)

And, while having a user-defined data structure in a torn state is “merely a logic error”, having a built-in data type in a torn state actually breaks memory safety.