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by vlovich1238 hours ago |
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upvoteby davemp6 hours ago|
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> 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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upvoteby vlovich1236 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby dnautics5 hours ago|
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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)

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upvoteby vlovich1231 hours ago|
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Neat. Why isn’t this in the main compiler / will it be? I’m happy to retract my statement if this becomes actually how zig compiles but it’s not a serious thing as it’s more a PoC of what’s possible today and may break later
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upvoteby davemp3 hours ago|
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This is pretty close to saying Rust is not very different than C because it has the unsafe keyword. That is, either an ignorant (of Zig) or disingenuous statement.
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upvoteby vlovich1231 hours ago|
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To me the zig position is akin to saying that because Asan, TSAn and ubsan exist, c++ is safe because you’re just running optimized for performance.

If you believe I mischaracterized zig, please enlighten me what I got wrong specifically rather than attacking my ad hominem

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upvoteby davemp54 minutes ago|
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I’m not going to write a detailed response to something that’s extremely close to what an LLM responds to “what UB does zig have?”

Arguing about whether certain static analysis should be opt in or opt out is just extremely uninteresting. It’s not like folks are auditing the unsafe blocks in their dependencies anyways.

If you want to talk about actual type system issues that’s more interesting.

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