P3874R1 — Should C++ be a memory-safe language?
Jon Bauman, Timur Doumler, Nevin Liber, Ryan McDougall, Pablo Halpern, Jeff Garland, Jonathan Müller
EWG
In recent years there have been numerous recommendations from industry, academia and government to prefer “memory-safe languages”1. Rust is consistently described as a memory-safe language while C++ is not — despite the fact that both can exhibit undefined behavior violating many of the commonly understood memory safety guarantees such as protection against buffer overflows and dangling pointers. This raises two important questions for which WG21 currently lacks consensus. Achieving it is essential to effectively direct the evolution of C++: