> doesn't this then defeat the whole purpose of using rust? No because in practice you only need unsafe a tiny minority of the time, whereas C++ is always unsa

> doesn't this then defeat the whole purpose of using rust? No because in practice you only need unsafe a tiny minority of the time, whereas C++ is always unsafe. Most programmers do not spend most of their time writing low-level cyclic data structure libraries. If they did, then indeed some of Rust’s advantages would be mitigated.