Memory Safety

Languages like Rust and Swift claim to be "memory-safe". What does that mean?

Memory Safety is the state of being protected from vulnerabilities that can arise from improper memory access control, such as buffer overflows.

Virtually all high-level programming languages implement some kind of memory safety; for example, most of them will check that an array index is in bounds before attempting to access it.

In this section we will explore garbage collection and other techniques implemented by various languages to provide memory safety.