[jolux]

Well, I feel pretty strongly about this issue as someone who cares about security. It is a question of ethics to me. I mean, saying Rust is unsafe because it has the unsafe block is like saying Haskell isn’t a pure language because it has IO. Yes, but it totally misses the point. The language is designed to minimize and constrain usage of unsafe features. And, outside of unsafe blocks, you know your code is safe. This is an important guarantee.

[flumpcakes]

> outside of unsafe blocks, you know your code is safe

Only for some common memory mistakes. And ony if the compiler doesn't have a bug. This sounds like a nitpic, but let's be clear that Rust is not "safe" as if it was some global quality that covered all of the language.

[jolux]

> Only for some common memory mistakes.

Yes, I’m talking about memory safety, because memory bugs cause most vulnerabilities.

[bsg75]

Morality and ethics seem odd to apply if a programming language should be developed, which seems to be the context Andrew was mentioning. Some use cases might apply (ex. medical devices).

I wonder if this type of debate came up when C++ was introduced amongst C developers.