> > and the experience of the large number of former C/C++ devs I've worked with after they learned Rust

> And it's not my experience or a large number of C/C++ devs I work with.

>> the only people I've talked to with that experience didn't really try to learn Rust and went in hoping that it wouldn't work for them

> Then your exposure isn't wide enough.

Or maybe your exposure is only to people who didn't give it a fair chance? I don't know how either of us can be confident that we know 100% for sure that our sample is more definitive.

> What I'm saying is that we can't say that the value is merely in the existence of a clear syntactic distinction between safe and unsafe code, because that distinction exists in C, only in C, the clearly delineated line between safe and unsafe code is that between `int main(void) {}` and anything that isn't that; i.e. any program other than that explicitly opts into unsafety. So any meaningful discussion about memory safe languages must include what you can do in the safe subset. In C's "safe subset" (the empty program), you can do nothing, and that's what makes it not valuable. But for my needs, what you can do in Rust's safe subset (compared to both Java and Zig) is also far too little (to justify the cost).

> It is, but what I'm trying to say is that it alone doesn't have much value. In C you also "can't write code that's memory unsafe without explicitly opting into it" by writing anything other than the empty program, but obviously you wouldn't consider C's memory-safe subset suitable because you can't use it to do what you want to do in C. Rust's value is not, therefore, in that it has a memory-safe subset, but that it has a useful memory-safe subset. It's just that the utility of that subset depends on the kinds of programs you'd want to use a low-level language in the first place.

That seems like an absurd false dichotomy in the form I was talking about before. I don't seriously believe that you can't easily identify when looking at Rust code whether unsafe is explicitly being allowed in it or not, or that you are writing programs that are doing things that would require unsafe literally everywhere.

I've genuinely been trying to understand where you're coming from, but the more I try, the more it seems like you just genuinely seem to think that you're too smart to accidentally write memory safety bugs, or that the memory safety bugs don't matter much. Maybe you're right, but I don't think there's anything left for me to learn from your point of view.

> or that you are writing programs that are doing things that would require unsafe literally everywhere

You don't need unsafe "literally everywhere" to run into issues. First, what matters most are the areas that are most subtle/tricky in your program. If in those areas Rust doesn't add much safety and makes things worse due to language complexity, that's a problem. Second, when you want low-level control, you might well want it in quite large swaths of the code. For example, one thing that low-level languages currently, in principle, do better than Java is arenas. But the whole point of arenas is that you want _all_ allocations in some large and elaborate call chain to go in the arena (and you'd like to enjoy both the standard library and 3rd party libraries). Rust doesn't make that easy (and neither does C++, for that matter).

> the more it seems like you just genuinely seem to think that you're too smart to accidentally write memory safety bugs, or that the memory safety bugs don't matter much

I don't see how you've reached that conclusion. I told you that for most programs I choose a language that is more memory-safe than Rust, and when I choose a language that's less memory-safe than Rust it's when Rust doesn't offer much safety, either.