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It's dangerous to treat rust like a panacea. _safe_ rust is memory safe. The problem is that for most nontrivial programs (especially very low level ones), you
by dahfizz 6y ago
It's dangerous to treat rust like a panacea. _safe_ rust is memory safe. The problem is that for most nontrivial programs (especially very low level ones), you are forced to use unsafe rust. Just look at how many times the unsafe keyword is used in the rust stdlib.
- jchw 6y agoIt’s not treating rust as a panacea, it’s that the ambient level of expectations for software is getting higher. Although C is going to be more ubiquitous than Rust for the foreseeable future, adding new code in memory unsafe languages will eventually require some justification as to why it’s worth the risk. We’re not there yet, but it’s coming. And yes. Low level code requires unsafety sometimes, or at least code that is not provably safe (digression: save for maybe using actual proofs a la seL4?) The important bit about Rust and other memory safe languages is that in Rust, memory unsafeness can be minimized and accounted for. That’s a whole class of bugs that is traditionally basically unmanageable in most non-trivial projects. Go is also memory safe by default, but the runtime is too heavy, and thus we’re here.