Leaks aren’t a memory safety issue, so that’s not one of the reasons for using Rust although the modern language design does make it less prone to accidental le

Leaks aren’t a memory safety issue, so that’s not one of the reasons for using Rust although the modern language design does make it less prone to accidental leaks. Unsafe has a strong name to encourage care about using it but that still doesn’t make it as unsafe as C is by default. You’re telling the compiler that there are certain areas where you have to do something which would normally not be allowed because of some information available to the developer but not the compiler. For example, Rust targets systems programming and it’s likely that you’ll need to do things such as dereferencing a pointer if you have to interact with a C API. Unsafe lets you do that without giving up other protections like the borrow checker and it confines that to specific blocks which you can audit more carefully. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html If I might use a car analogy, going from a mid-20th century language model like C to Rust is like buying a car which has automatic braking and lane assist. Yes, you can still crash if you turn those features off but the ratio of preventable problems to special circumstances where you know you’re doing something tricky is incredibly high.