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by shikck2007 hours ago|

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Sure, but a data race is, IMHO not the same as memory safety. A data race, can be 100% memory safe, but just cause a logic bug in some program. I often see people mixing memory safety with racing. Go has bounds checks so you end up with a panic either way. Not UB.

As an (outside go) example, Ocaml (5) promises strong memory safety, but not to be data race free. A data race is not something we can prevent, because its usually not bound by code, but by time and the race-source rarely in source-code.

This means we have data races in http, database inserts etc. The source is usually not a concurrent task in source code-land.

by tuveson3 hours ago|

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Russ Cox points out that races are the one place in Go besides unsafe where Go lacks memory safety: https://research.swtch.com/gorace

I do think the nitpicking about this is mostly from people that want to say “my favorite language is safer than Go” which stupid and annoying.

by speedstyle6 hours ago|

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Races can be memory safe (they are in Java and Ocaml), but in Go they can indeed cause UB.

https://go.dev/ref/mem#restrictions:~:text=such%20races,corr...

https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2025/07/24/memory-safety.html (I don't agree with everything here, but it's a very thorough explanation)

by saagarjha6 hours ago|

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That’s a race condition, not a data race.

by shikck2006 hours ago|

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Now you are pushing pixels. A data-race IS a kind of race condition.

My point is "races" happen all over. In concurrent code, databases, http and pretty much anywhere where you have some kind of timing, not scoped to a unit.

by senderista6 hours ago|

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A race condition is an application invariant violation under concurrency, so it has no application-independent definition. A data race is unsynchronized access by two concurrent threads to the same memory location where at least one access is a write. Ergo, the definition of a data race has nothing to do with application logic.

I think this should make the distinction between data races and race conditions pretty clear.

by phplovesong5 hours ago|

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A data race is by definition a class of an race condition. This is basic compsci literature, and there is no other way to put it, as even a non programmer can see the similarity.

Not sure why you would be that nitpicky for something so trivial?

by senderista5 hours ago|

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I find this distinction extremely useful in practice because it explains why a static analyzer like Rust's type checker can prevent all data races but can do nothing about race conditions. (Similarly, a dynamic analyzer like ThreadSanitizer can detect data races but not race conditions, because it knows nothing about application logic.)