> Doing unsafe stuff is pretty inevitable if you want to do anything non-hello-world-ish.

So the vast majority of Rust projects involve writing at least one unsafe block? Is that really your claim?

And even if you do end up writing an unsafe block, that should be a massive flag that the code in said block should deserve extra comments on why it is safe, and extra unit tests on verifying that it does not blow up.

How do you know the unsafe operation is safe? What are the preconditions the code block has? Write it down, review it, test it.

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saghm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Exactly; I feel like a lot of people seem to misunderstand what Rust is trying to solve. It's fundamentally not trying to make unsafe code impossible; it's making the number of places you need to audit it a tiny fraction of your codebase compared to needing to audit the entirety of a C or C++ codebase. When I'm doing code reviews, you'd better believe I'm going to spend some extra time on any unsafe block I see to figure out if it's necessary and if so, if it's actually safe safe (with the default assumption for both of those being that they're not until I can convince myself otherwise).

	▲	skydhash an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The thing is you can actually write quite good C code (see OpenBSD project). The power of C is that it's pragmatic. It lets you write code with you taking the full responsibility of being a responsible person. To err is human, but we developed a set of practices to handle this (by making sure the gun is unloaded and the safety is on before storing it to avoid putting holes in feet). I like type checking and other compile time checks, but sometimes they feel very ceremonial. And all of them are inference based, so they still relies on the axiom being right and that the chain of rules is not broken somewhere. And in the end they are annotations, not the runtime algorithm.