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by sidlls 3345 days ago
I don't understand why the public marketing effort is so focused on safety, either, but it is. When I see Rust mentioned, e.g. here at HN, I cringe a little because odds are it's in the context of how unsafe everything else is, or there is at least some connection made to safety. "Obsession" seems loaded.

Rust is a very nice language with many useful and interesting features which may exist because of the developers' focus on safety but can very much be marketed without calling out safety all the time, and especially without the hints, suggestion, and innuendo that using a language without Rust's safety model is somehow dirty, dangerous, or worse irresponsible or unethical.

2 comments

By "public marketing effort" do you mean "people talking about Rust"?

Personally, I interpret the focus on memory safety as a response to "memory issues aren't a big deal" or "memory issues only come from incompetence" viewpoints.

Again here the word "safety" starts to get rather muddy. What Rust calls safe is not what Ada calls safe. I'd rather be specific about what we're talking about.

Memory safety is not, itself, program correctness. It's just one way programs can go wrong.