Rust’s whole premise of guaranteed memory safety through compiletime checks has always been undermined when confronted with the reality that certain foundational operations must still be implemented using unsafe. Inevitably folks concede that lower level libraries will have these unsafe blocks and still expect higher level code to trust them, and at that point we’ve essentially recreated the core paradigm of C: trust in the programmer’s diligence. Yeah Rust makes this trust visible, but it doesn’t actually eliminate it in “hard” code.
The punchline here, so to speak, is that for all Rust’s claims to revolutionize safety, it simply(!) formalizes the same unwritten social contract C developers have been meandering along with for decades. The uniqueness boils down to “we still trust the devs, but at least now we’ve made them swear on it in writing”.
The punchline here, so to speak, is that for all Rust’s claims to revolutionize safety, it simply(!) formalizes the same unwritten social contract C developers have been meandering along with for decades. The uniqueness boils down to “we still trust the devs, but at least now we’ve made them swear on it in writing”.