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At some point, in the context of developing on commodity hardware using mainstream operating systems, you need to trust something and use unsafe. There's no way

At some point, in the context of developing on commodity hardware using mainstream operating systems, you need to trust something and use unsafe. There's no way around it. People have varying tolerances on the use of unsafe code. I'm not aware of any coherent sub-community with a fundamentalist take on it though. My own personal tolerance is "when using it, carefully justify it." Generally, this takes the form of making the code run faster. Otherwise, I'll sacrifice almost everything else to avoid unsafe. Thankfully, said sacrifices are neither common nor arduous (in my experience).

kbenson 9y ago
To the GP, also note that there is a distinction between what Rust is able to confirm is safe with the compiler and what is or is not necessarily safe. An unsafe block carefully vetted to be implemented correctly with a formally proven safe algorithm may still be safe in the general sense, if not save in the Rust compiler enforced sense. Indeed, that's one of the major reasons for using unsafe blocks, so foregoing them entirely may be unduly hamstringing yourself for no reason.