You 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,

You 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.