from Hacker News

Elixir is still safe

by manusachi on 7/24/23, 6:22 PM with 34 comments

• by e-dant on 7/24/23, 9:22 PM

  Without stepping on anyone’s toes, I think we can agree that “safety” could be broken down a bit. Memory safety, thread safety, fine… but there’s a whole forest past those trees.

  Is it a safety feature to type-check regular expressions using dependent types? Is Python a security vulnerability because the performance can be unpredictable?

  I don’t know.

  Rust, for that matter, doesn’t protect you from running out of memory from leaking data on the heap — or from running out of stack space because your infinitely recursive function doesn’t halt. Maybe that’s not part of memory safety — but that’s my point.

  There’s a whole safety forest out there. Whenever I read an article about safety in software, it seems like a comfy blanket statement. “This is a nice definition which I will live in.”

  I just don’t see how it’s so flat.

• by aeurielesn on 7/24/23, 7:43 PM

  What would normally be the process to debunk a published paper? Simply publishing another paper debunking it in the same journal?

• by greatfilter251 on 7/24/23, 9:23 PM

  > Practitioner perceptions are formed through personal experience, and not based on empirical evidence

  The disagreement here is rooted in the empirical worldview. Empirically, "rarely" and "never" cannot be (reliably) distinguished, and so adherents of this worldview fail to distinguish claims which are meant to distinguish them.

• by ano88888 on 7/25/23, 4:37 AM

  Deciding which i should use : Elixir or Clojurescript or python or nodejs