Type Safety

Definitions

1. The degree to which a language or system prevents type errors — operations applied to values of the wrong type — through compile-time checks, runtime checks, or both. Languages like Rust and Haskell provide strong type safety, while C allows unchecked casts and pointer arithmetic that can silently reinterpret memory.

   In plain English: A property of a programming language that prevents you from accidentally treating one kind of data as another, catching mistakes early.

   Example: "Moving from JavaScript to TypeScript gave us type safety across the entire API boundary, and we stopped seeing 'undefined is not a function' in production."

Related Terms

• Syntax Sugar
• Overload
• Runtime
• Type Alias
• Type Cast
• Type Coercion
• Type Safe
• Conditional Type