Most importantly, if someone does find a way, it's an error in either the spec or the browser implementation. It's not flagged as "undefined behavior" and we go on with the assumption some web pages just break your browser or the OS hosting it.
I can tolerate a thousand-page spec for a system that can't crash unsafely; it's a much bigger risk for one with unchecked pointer indirection as a feature.
This is a narrow view where you focus only on memory safety and buffer overflow. Undefined Behaviours goes way wilder than that.
Many problems coming by UBs do not goe into any crash, just wrong results and wrong behaviour which is something even worst.
And currently, JavaScript is full of that. Almost everything that JS can not handle (or do not know how to handle is undefined) or purely implementation specific.
There are circumstances where you want the features C++ brings to solve a problem. But solving a problem with dynamite is still solving a problem with dynamite; there's a lot more ways it can go wrong than solving the problem with a steam drill, to torture an analogy a bit.
Excepted that a language is not absolute, is not dynamite or not dynamite. It is what you do of it depending of the subset you use. C++ is not exception.
... which goes back to the topic of the HN post; that's only one way to look at the state of a running program, and it's a way that has strengths and weaknesses. The utility of it comes at the cost of the program failing in ways programs in other languages structurally cannot fail (unless you do something truly exotic, like implement a subset of a C++ compiler or interpreter in that language).
JS is ... well, JS
This is at least for me the first time I've seen them discussed in the same breath, which is revolutionary: C++ the language bringing a blue screen to a desktop near you; JS the language bringing your startup to its knees.
I guess I never realized that while they are polar opposites, there are probably some subtle cultural similarities that would make for some hilarious unearthing
That's a bullshit argument very close to FUD.
You don't need to know the 1400 pages of the C++ standard to use safely a subset of it. Specially with proper tooling to help you.
Do you really think that every web frontend developer knows every W3C/ECMA standard every time they create a website ? Or that they have even an idea of feature the complexity of the Web browser they use. One tips: no they don't.