Much of the conversation around software memory safety has treated the concept as if it were a binary where software is either memory safe or it is not. The truth, as is often the case, is more complex. In an ideal world, we would all write our software in memory safe by default languages, never needing to use an unsafe block or to interface with software written in a non-memory safe by default language. We do not live in that world, however, and are unlikely to live in that world any time soon. Memory safety in software should be considered a continuum, rather than being binary. Within a continuum, even if we are never at the ideal, we can strive to improve with every line of code we write - whether it is net new code, changes to code we are responsible for maintaining or (when appropriate) targeted rewrites of existing code.

When I saw the the prospero challenge by @mattkeeter.com, it looked right up my alley. If you haven't read that yet, go read it before proceeding. You can find the finished source code for this here. I've been working on a Cranelift frontend for a toy programming language as part of an honors proje...