I think it is absolutely arbitrary. First because I believe every order of magnitude is significant. You handwave away that one order of magnitude difference is fine but three is bad. I think this is hypocritcal, and that if you want to be a memory safety purist who ignores all tradeoffs and declares a language fundamentally unusable on safety grounds, even a single order of magnitude of additional issues should clearly be unacceptable. And simultaneously you group them arbitrarily -- what is your actual basis for suggesting that Zig code is more likely to be 100 than 10, or that 10 somehow bares grouping at 100 rather than grouping .1 and 10 together at 1? You also fail to address that there may be more than one order of magnitude between Rust and Java. It is entirely plausible that Rust is closer to Zig than to Java.

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Rate-limit edit replying to below response:

> a variety of statements I haven't said

We are in a conversation thread specifically about statements of this nature, which I was contesting. The original poster of this thread called their arbitrary definition of memory safety "table stakes" and explicitly said that they rule out Zig as a language completely on this basis alone. If you don't agree with them, I'm not sure what we're discussing.

> you take issue with the assumptions I'm making ... but you could just state that instead of saying that I'm being hypocritical

The only assumption I disagreed with is assigning Zig to exactly 100 when a poster I was replying to originally asserted a range of "10 or 100"; and regardless of whether we agree on assigning a concrete lower/upper bound to that assumption, everything else is not an assumption but a value judgment given the condition "assuming the premise holds". Yet your position is taking those value judgments - which orders of magnitudes to accept, which to group together as being the same degree of memory safety - and asserting them as objectively correct boundaries with minimal rationalisation beyond "because I feel it is so".