[atoav]

I think safety is about risk managment. Having a seatbelt on in a car is safer than not having one. This is despite the fact that most regular people really don’t desire crashing their car. By putting on a seatbelt you pay a small prize to weaken the impact of a existing risk (crashing your car).

Rust’s idea of safety is similar: it tries to reduce the impact of common risks that happen during programming. It won’t save you from logical errors — just like a seatbelt won’t save you when you decide to maneuver your vehicle into a flaming pit of lava. The only thing that would save you in that situation is not maneuvering into flaming lava pits.

That beeing said rust has a very straightforward implementation for Unit Tests and Integration tests which could help you dealing with remaining risks.

Of course you can always live on the edge, ignore seatbelts and do things like calling unwrap() on results that might not retun Ok(value) at all times. But that will bite you sooner than later.

What Rust is really good at IMO, is to make risks clear at any givrn moment in time. The routes your program can take are very well represented, especially because of the ownership model. Once you understood it you can make very strong assumptions about which part of the software is manipulating which data. These strong assumptions also help mitigating risk. It is harder in Rust to do things just wrong than in most other languages and it is still fast