alt Hacker News> As to "getting it right" - things are not so simple. The emphasis on memory-safety soundness is based on some empirical hypotheses, some better founded than others, and it's unclear what "getting it right" means.
It means eliminating undefined behavior, and unplanned interaction between distant parts of the program.
Eliminating undefined behaviour is a means to an end (reduces problematic bugs, but not all undefined behaviour is equally responsible to such bugs), and it's not a binary thing (virtually all programs need to interact with software written in languages that don't eliminate undefined behaviour, so clearly there's tolerance to the possibility of undefined behaviour).
Don't get me wrong - less undefined behaviour is better, but drawing a binary line between some and none makes for a convenient talking point, but isn't necessarily the sweet spot for the complicated and context-dependent series of tradeoffs that is software correctness.