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I’m not sure what you mean by this: “Writing code in Rust does not generate safe code.” I mean philosophically you could say there is no safe code, but then wh

I’m not sure what you mean by this: “Writing code in Rust does not generate safe code.” I mean philosophically you could say there is no safe code, but then what’s the point of any language improvement. Perhaps you mean that Rust has unsafe, which allows you to write unsafe code in Rust. But technically that term is reserved for the developer to make a claim that though the compiler can’t determine the safety of this code, the developer is claiming it is safe. Then there is safe Rust, if you write safe Rust, the guarantees that the program output is safe are pretty high. Given that no software is devoid of bugs, it’s obviously not 100%. So do you have a specific argument your making about why Rust is not safe? Or is it a general comment about software? Edit: I suppose you could be pedantic in that rustc doesn’t generate code, but technically it does, mir and then llvmir. That code then gets compiled to platform specific binaries.

Nokinside 8y ago
> mean philosophically you could say there is no safe code, but then what’s the point of any language improvement. I have been writing safety critical code for living, so I think that saying that code "is safe" because it is written in some language is categorical error (not just error of degree) unless it is a language enables formally proofing correctness. You can take fundamentally unsafe language like C. Restrict to subset of it MISRA C and use external static code analysis like Astree that that uses abstract interpretation to prove that there are no run time errors: no memory errors, no division of zero erros, no out-of-bounds array indexing, floating-point or integer overflows, loops always terminate, floating point rounding errors stay within specified limits etc. Something that Rust does not have. Rust has some potential and there are some companies that attempt to provide tooling to make it possible to write safe Rust code, but it's not there yet.
- Rusky 8y ago
  That sounds exactly like an error of degree- Rust does have "no memory errors" proof tools already, built into the language.

Nokinside 8y ago

> mean philosophically you could say there is no safe code, but then what’s the point of any language improvement. I have been writing safety critical code for living, so I think that saying that code "is safe" because it is written in some language is categorical error (not just error of degree) unless it is a language enables formally proofing correctness. You can take fundamentally unsafe language like C. Restrict to subset of it MISRA C and use external static code analysis like Astree that that uses abstract interpretation to prove that there are no run time errors: no memory errors, no division of zero erros, no out-of-bounds array indexing, floating-point or integer overflows, loops always terminate, floating point rounding errors stay within specified limits etc. Something that Rust does not have. Rust has some potential and there are some companies that attempt to provide tooling to make it possible to write safe Rust code, but it's not there yet.

Rusky 8y ago
That sounds exactly like an error of degree- Rust does have "no memory errors" proof tools already, built into the language.