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by scottlamb 2705 days ago
And that'd be a totally useful way of looking at it if most real Rust programs didn't have any "abnormal" (unsafe) code in them. They do, though, and it still must be debugged somehow. Maybe the "unsafe" is hidden away in some transitive dependency crate or even in std, but it's there.

It's incredibly useful to limit the regions of unsafety and use them to build reusable, well-tested safe abstractions, but it's a mistake to confuse that with eliminating unsafe entirely or ignore the possibility there could still be errors within them.
1 comments
staticassertion 2705 days ago
> And that'd be a totally useful way of looking at it if most real Rust programs didn't have any "abnormal" (unsafe) code in them. They do, though,

I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of Rust code (outside of std) is safe. I've written unsafe once ever, in years of writing rust.

I agree that it's unfair to generalize that debuggers have no use in rust, but it's fair to generalize and say that most rust developers do not experience segfaults, or other memory corruption issues that often call for a more advanced approach to debugging.

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scottlamb 2705 days ago
I'd guess that about 1% of Rust code is unsafe (holds true for a project of mine) but almost all Rust projects depend on some crate's unsafe code. And I've hit segfaults caused by unsafe code in crates I depended on several times. (Most commonly, due to FFI code trying to duplicate a C library's ABI in a .rs file and not getting it exactly right for the version/config options it the library was built with on my machine. This is a disturbingly brittle way of doing things but will probably be common until bindgen is distributed with rustup by default or some such.)

You may not use the debugger often, but it's there if you need/want it, which is an important message that I think is lost with "all Rust programmers are print debuggers".

Congrats on only using unsafe once in years. That's pretty neat.

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jashmatthews 2705 days ago
> I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of Rust code (outside of std) is safe. I've written unsafe once ever, in years of writing rust.

It's very much about project choice. I immediately ran into unsafe trying to test some functions marked extern. Then again writing toy VMs and GC algos.

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