Don wrote:
In practice, the big disadvantage which D has is that it can make calls to C libraries which are not necessarily memory safe -- and this is an important feature of the language. Dealing with the external, uncheckable libraries is always going to be a weak point. Both Java and .net have mitigated this by rewriting a fair chunk of an OS in their libraries. That's probably never going to happen for D.
Java has the jni interface where one can execute arbitrary C code. Obviously, that isn't memory safe, either.
Some of the standard C library functions are safe, some of them aren't. We'll mark them appropriately in the std.c.* headers.
I expect there will be a lot of pressure for 3rd party D libraries to be marked as safe, so I think this problem will sort itself out over time.
