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C makes it trivial to implement poorly, though.

(Note: I'm playing devil's advocate here to some extent. My view is that safety is important, but lack of provable safety is not some terrible Demogorgon that we should hide in fear from. I think a lot of the concern over safety is valid, but in some contexts it's just overhyped.)



My view is that lack of provable safety should be resolved by defensive code (runtime checks). And then, you are safe (if safety is important in your code, which probably should by default in a professional setting).


I agree, it is solvable by defensive code. The vast majority of the time that code is perfectly sufficient. The number of people who don't die when the hundreds of thousands of things that don't go wrong when an embedded C-program doesn't crash or blow apart because of memory safety bugs daily demonstrates this. I don't think people understand just how much of our world is run, quite literally, by "not provably safe" code. It's not just C and C++, either.

Which is one reason why I don't buy the "memory safety" argument as a very strong one for adopting Rust. There are other much better reasons to do so for a certain class of programming, in my opinion.




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