I am honestly curious here. I am a PLT researcher so I am in a bubble where people use the term consistently with how I use it. You are the first person I meet (for some notion of "meet" ;) that uses the term differently. But without external sources it's hard to judge how wide-spread your definition (that you still haven't spelled out...) is.
I think we actually agree on all of the factual points here, we just don't agree on how languages should be categorized/labeled according to their guarantees in both a theoretical and a practical sense, and that's largely a subjective matter anyway. So, happy to agree to disagree here.
U.S. and International Partners Issue Recommendations to Secure Software Products Through Memory Safety
They recommand Go among other language in their paper.
https://media.defense.gov/2023/Dec/06/2003352724/-1/-1/0/THE...
> Memory safety is a property of some programming languages that prevents programmers from introducing certain types of bugs related to how memory is used. Since memory safety bugs are often security issues, memory safe languages are more secure than languages that are not memory safe.
That is the definition they give. Since Go does not "prevent programmers from introducing certain types of bugs related to how memory is used." it does not fall under this definition. They can list go as memory safe, but then either they disagree with their own definition or made the mistake of adding Go to that list. Memory safety is not a spectrum. You are either memory safe or unsafe. The spectrum is in the unsafety. Go is obviously less unsafe than C for example.
if there is one takeaway from this discussion, i think it must be that memory safety does not have any single, commonly-accepted, or objective definition -- and that it is pretty obviously a spectrum, not a boolean
"Memory safety denotes the degree to which a programming language guides and protects developers from memory‑related errors—ranging from minimal, manual checks to comprehensive static and runtime enforcement—through mechanisms like strong typing, ownership or borrow checking, and garbage collection."
And then also include modern C++ in their lists. because by all accounts it is memory safe by that definition.
