alt Hacker NewsYour general point stands - wasm's original goal was mainly sandboxing - but
1. Wasm does provide some amount of memory safety even to compiled C code. For example, the call stack is entirely protected. Also, indirect calls are type-checked, etc.
2. Wasm can provide memory safety if you compile to WasmGC. But, you can't really compile C to that, of course...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but with LLVM on Wasm, I think casting a function pointer to the wrong type will result in you calling some totally unrelated function of the correct type? That sounds like the opposite of safety to me.
I agree about the call stack, and don't know about GC.