[adwhit]

I did specifically mention "normal code". `unsafe` is not normal code. Obviously if there is a segfault, I'd fire up a debugger - GDB is just fine for such purposes.

The comparison with Java is interesting. With Java, I have often found that errors occur in a rather non-local fashion, due to dynamic code loading, confusing inheritance trees, and ubiquitous mutations and what have you. Maybe I'm not actually calling the function I thought I was, maybe because I have actually received a subclass of my expected class. Print-debugging is often too narrow to highlight the cause. In such a situation, I would fire up the debugger and inspect the general state of the application (which Java makes relatively easy to do).

In contrast, in Rust things tend to happen in a very constrained fashion. You can't randomly mutate things, you can't (without considerable effort) make complicated graph structures where everything can touch everything else. With the occasional exception of highly generic code, your call sites and function arguments are exactly what you expect. So I can rely on print-debugging to quickly find the cause of my problem.

Incidentally the same is true with Haskell, moreso even, except due to laziness the evaluation order can be harder to ascertain - debug statements can appear in a strange order (or not at all).