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Yes, one bad unsafe block in rust can screw up even safe code, everybody here understands that. The difference is that the potential problem surface is much sma
by Too 9y ago
Yes, one bad unsafe block in rust can screw up even safe code, everybody here understands that. The difference is that the potential problem surface is much smaller and it is obvious where it might be.
And by limiting the attack surface the language becomes safer. Not formally, but in practice.
- foldr 9y agoHow small the potential problem is depends purely on how much unsafe code you write, regardless of whether it has a special keyword associated with it.
- setr 9y agoYou can imagine though, that the intended model for rust programming is to avoid "unsafe" as much as necessary. Essentially that C++ is using unsafe by default, while rust has safe by default. You have to go out of your way not to stay in safe for the most part (if rust's design does what they intended), which implies that most of your code should be provably safe (by rust's definition of safe), as long as the ideally small unsafe blocks are correct, if the program compiles. Where in C++, there is no such gaurantee regarding compilation; even your "safe" code isn't shown to be safe by the compiler (additional tooling may apply further checks); your whole codebase is assumed to be unsafe. The "potential problem" is naturally the size of your codebase, whereas rust offers it as a subset of the codebase.