Simon Peyton Jones initial intuition [0] was that Rust would be full of soundness holes due to not starting with a full formalization. Derek Dryer, Ralf Jung and others in the RustBelt project [1] did amazing work in formalizing Rust's safety guarantees, showing that Peyton Jones' guess was not accurate.
There is nothing wrong about having bugs, of course, but the reaction to the bug in this thread shows that mathematical correctness is not as universally valued as I thought it would be. I agree with the sentiment that this is a bigger issue that shouldn't be discussed in a technical thread about a specific bug. However, after reading this, it is unclear to me whether mathematical correctness is regarded in the Rust project as an explicit goal, an explicit non-goal or an unessential nice-to-have. (I do not mean to insinuate anything with the word "unclear", as I believe all three options are valid and appeal to different use cases. Almost all of the popular languages don't care about this, for instance.)
There is nothing wrong about having bugs, of course, but the reaction to the bug in this thread shows that mathematical correctness is not as universally valued as I thought it would be. I agree with the sentiment that this is a bigger issue that shouldn't be discussed in a technical thread about a specific bug. However, after reading this, it is unclear to me whether mathematical correctness is regarded in the Rust project as an explicit goal, an explicit non-goal or an unessential nice-to-have. (I do not mean to insinuate anything with the word "unclear", as I believe all three options are valid and appeal to different use cases. Almost all of the popular languages don't care about this, for instance.)
[0] https://youtu.be/t0mhvd3-60Y?t=130 [1] https://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/