> That is, are there attempts to improve the Rust language and/or optimizer such that more and more "unsafe" sections can be replaced by safe code that has the

> That is, are there attempts to improve the Rust language and/or optimizer such that more and more "unsafe" sections can be replaced by safe code that has the same performance? I write a fair bit of production and hobby Rust, some of it very performance-intensive. And at this point, 'unsafe' is already very rare in the code I see. The most common uses: 1. For implementing certain core data structures based on pointers. This is pretty rare—there are good implementations of just about everything I need, either from the 'std::collections' library (which uses a moderate amount of 'unsafe') or from third parties (who tend to use much less 'unsafe'). 2. For the FFI. Again, this is increasingly rare: More and more key libraries are now available as pure Rust, and the "big" C libraries typically have well-maintained bindings. 3. Theoretically, for performance. But I've written tons of high-performance, benchmarked Rust without ever touching 'unsafe'. And I do feed a fair bit of my code through fuzzers, and they've never found an exploitable weakness. So my gut feeling? There really isn't much 'unsafe' out there. And the small amount of 'unsafe' code that exists is probably—based on my experience fuzzing it—"safer" than all but the very best C/C++ code. I can live with that for now, on a strictly practical level.