Putting a buggy system in a memory safe environment is certainly not 'the fix'. The fix is to find the precise bug or architectural deficiency and fix it.
It's easier to failsafe something than make things perfect
Even better, when you failsafe you plan for the (unknown) future.
That's why we have circuit breakers, hydraulic and electric fuses, pressure relief valves, etc. Because no one thinks they can know all things that can go wrong in the future (with catastrophic consequences) and plan for that
That’s the reasoning behind the Erlang “let it crash” philosophy. It’s not advocating poor programming; it’s asking processes to handle whatever issues they can within reason, but otherwise to crash and be restarted by their supervisor process, rather than try to carry on in a probably erroneous state.
It’s also a recognition that in complex systems, something unanticipated is going to go wrong sometimes, and rather have a plan for handling the failure than pretend that the system will never hit a really bizarre failure mode.
Your circuit breaker analogy made me think of this.
