[ivanbakel]

> There were certainly a lot of people running around claiming that "Rust eliminates the whole class of memory safety bugs."

Safe Rust does do this. Dropping into unsafe Rust is the prerogative of the programmer who wants to take on the burden of preventing bugs themselves. Part of the technique of Rust programming is minimising the unsafe part so memory errors are eliminated as much as possible.

If the kernel could be written in 100% safe Rust, then any memory error would be a compiler bug.

[uecker]

Yes, but this is the marketing bullshit I am calling out. "Safe Rust" != "Rust" and it is not "Safe Rust" which is competing with C it is "Rust".

[ivanbakel]

> it is not "Safe Rust" which is competing with C it is "Rust".

It is intended that Safe Rust be the main competitor to C. You are not meant to write your whole program in unsafe Rust using raw pointers - that would indicate a significant failure of Rust’s expressive power.

Its true that many Rust programs involve some element of unsafe Rust, but that unsafety is meant to be contained and abstracted, not pervasive throughout the program. That’s a significant difference from how C’s unsafety works.

[simonask]

This is just so obtuse. Be serious.

Even if you somehow manage to ignore the very obvious theoretical argument why it works, the amount of quantitative evidence at this point is staggering: Rust, including unsafe warts and all, substantially improve the ability of any competent team to deliver working software. By a huge margin.

This is the programming equivalent of vaccine denialism.