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This is (to me) a very odd article. It creates some straw man definitions and points out that Rust doesn't hold up to them, and then gives a more accurate defin

This is (to me) a very odd article. It creates some straw man definitions and points out that Rust doesn't hold up to them, and then gives a more accurate definition and complains that it isn't expansive enough. It concludes by pointing out that unsafe code is unsafe. Speaking personally, Rust offers a rather nice featureful syntax (and libraries), and saves me the trouble of worrying about certain kinds of very typical mistakes. I may want a hole, but a cordless drill with a comfortable hand grip is very likely my tool of choice. Especially thinking back to my father's corded underpowered temperamental drill with the easy to lose chuck key...

wussboy 5y ago
My dad always taped the chuck key to the drill's cord. Those were the days...
avgcorrection 5y ago
I was surprised to see that it was written by a Rust implementation insider. The first half is very meandering. Please just get to the point and leave footnotes and asterisks for things like “safe”. (Just my preference.)
cryptonector 5y ago
Moreover, at some point the rubber meets the road and some "unsafe" code almost certainly must exist at that point. The goal should not be to have zero lines of unsafe code, but to have so few that it is possible to review and understand them and to understand why, though they are "unsafe", they yield safe behavior. Rust does do this!
lamontcg 5y ago
> It concludes by pointing out that unsafe code is unsafe. It spent an awful lot of time on that without making very good points. About one paragraph of text could have pointed that reducing the surface area of unsafe code is therefore a good thing, which leads to "rewrite it in rust" which gets you more safe code. There also seemed to be a little bit of conflation of safe code with bug-free code which just isn't possible. Arguing English semantics of words which are being used to describe very specific compiler behavior is going to be a GIGO argument.

wussboy 5y ago

My dad always taped the chuck key to the drill's cord. Those were the days...

avgcorrection 5y ago

I was surprised to see that it was written by a Rust implementation insider. The first half is very meandering. Please just get to the point and leave footnotes and asterisks for things like “safe”. (Just my preference.)

cryptonector 5y ago

Moreover, at some point the rubber meets the road and some "unsafe" code almost certainly must exist at that point. The goal should not be to have zero lines of unsafe code, but to have so few that it is possible to review and understand them and to understand why, though they are "unsafe", they yield safe behavior. Rust does do this!

lamontcg 5y ago

> It concludes by pointing out that unsafe code is unsafe. It spent an awful lot of time on that without making very good points. About one paragraph of text could have pointed that reducing the surface area of unsafe code is therefore a good thing, which leads to "rewrite it in rust" which gets you more safe code. There also seemed to be a little bit of conflation of safe code with bug-free code which just isn't possible. Arguing English semantics of words which are being used to describe very specific compiler behavior is going to be a GIGO argument.