To add, Go has nil pointers which lead to panics when de-referenced. No one would call Go memory unsafe for this behavior likely because it's a "panic". The thing is, the 0 address is a guaranteed panic too. It's just the OS is going to print "Segmentation fault" instead of "panic". There's nothing memory unsafe about this. The process will with 100% gurantee, reliably, and deterministically exit in the same way as a "panic" in any other language here. The unsafe aspect is when it's not a nil pointer but a dangling pointer to something that may still exist and read garbage. That is unsafe.