The thing I wish we would remember, as developers, is that not all programs need to be so "safe".

There's lots of reasons to write artistically gibberish code, just as there is with natural language (e.g. Lewis Carroll). Most programs aren't going for code as art though. They're trying to accomplish something definite through a computer and gibberish is directly counterproductive. If you don't mean what you write or care what you get, software seems like the wrong way to accomplish your goals. I'd still question whether you want software even in a probabilistic argument along these lines.

Even for those cases where gibberish is meaningful at a higher level (like IOCCC and poetry), it should be intentional and very carefully crafted. You can use escape hatches to accomplish this in Rust, though I make no comment on the artistic merits of doing so.

The argument you're making is that uncontrolled, unintentional gibberish is a positive attribute. I find that a difficult argument to accept. If we could wave a magic wand and make all code safe with no downsides, who among us wouldn't?

It doesn't change anything about Super Mario World speedruns because you can accomplish the same thing as arbitrary code execution inputs with binary patching. We just have this semi-irrational belief that one is cheating and one is not.

You are not doing Rust any favours by arguing that code that may have memory safety issues is gibberish and something that could be associated with the IOCCC. Ramping something up to 11 makes it hard to take seriously.

You could write rust code with logic errors. I could write C with a memory leak that doesn't matter because of the context it runs in. Neither program is gibberish but one of them causes real problems.

If you want or need the guarantees Rust provides, then go ahead and use Rust. If you want to handle the guarantees yourself, then Rust may not be the language for you. You can still have bugs whether or not you use Rust, so your Rust program may have some form of unsafety. In Linux, a Rust program with setuid root can lead to privilege escalation vulnerabilities, even if it doesn't contain a single line of "unsafe" code.

Either way, telling someone they have to pick between using a safe language like Rust and writing "semantically gibberish" is a false dichotomy. Please don't call programs written in memory-unsafe languages semantic gibberish until you prove that there are absolutely zero bugs in your program.

> If we could wave a magic wand and make all code safe with no downsides, who among us wouldn't?

Anybody would, but Rust is not that wand, and there is no wand.

Code needs to _exist_ in order to matter. Time is finite, my free-time is even more limited. Most of my code is garbage collected, and runs great, but if I needed it to be really fast, I would use Zig.

I don't need to be told what software is for or how to accomplish my goals, and I'm sure you wouldn't understand my goals. I've been making code creatively for almost 30 years. You might as well tell an origami artist that folding paper is a bad way to accomplish their goals.

The attitude among _some_ Rust devs (or armchair coders) that there is no place for non-rust manual-memory languages is insanely disconnected with reality. Games exist, Rust ones hardly do. Synths exist, Rust ones hardly do. Not everything is a high-availability microservice or an OS kernel! Look around!

Edited to add:

> "Safety" is just a shorthand for "my program means what I say". Unsafety is semantic gibberish.

You know this isn't true, right? "Safety" in Rust specifically means memory safety and thread safety: no use-after-free, no data races, no null/dangling pointer dereferences, no buffer overflows. That's it. It doesn't guarantee your program is correct, and it doesn't even prevent memory leaks.

Things being manually managed doesn't make them gibberish, and something being implicit, rather than explicit, doesn't mean its gibberish.

The attitude of Rust being bug-free is _insaaaane_. A "bug" is just code that breaks expectations, I promise we can and will write those in every language forever.