4 ms·

> That's completely worthless. C is also memory-safe if you stay within the rules for memory safety. It's really not any weaker of a guarantee than Rust makes,

> That's completely worthless. C is also memory-safe if you stay within the rules for memory safety. It's really not any weaker of a guarantee than Rust makes, being memory-safe if you stay within the rules of not saying `unsafe`. Or opening /proc/self/mem for writing, anyway. I'd also feel a lot better about Rust's moral highground of memory safety if its undefined behavior was actually spelled out a bit more rather than just punting the hard parts to llvm docs. I don't think every Rust user knows how to avoid aliasing problems between `&mut` and `*mut` either.

pcwalton 11y ago
Well, I think there's a very big practical difference between being unsafe in general and unsafe only within clearly delimited boundaries (that you can forbid with a lint). The latter is pretty much necessary for any language other than strictly sandboxed ones like JavaScript, while the former is something I think all languages in 2016 should take as sacrosanct from the get-go. (We've been trying and failing for about 45 years to prove that programmers will avoid making the same basic memory management mistakes if they're just trained better; I think it's well past time to give up and delegate these checks to the machine.) That said, I don't agree with the claim that Nim is less safe than Rust because Nim uses "ptr" types and Rust uses "unsafe" blocks to mark unsafe regions. I prefer Rust's approach, but it's pretty much just a question of UI, not anything substantive.