[silasdavis]

We need to distinguish nodes written in Rust vs smart contracts.

Given the context assuming smart contracts you may have a point. Often consensus will be much slower and a limiting factor in execution. Solana may be a bit different here in their efforts to parallelise independent transactions.

High level provable languages always seemed like a good idea to me for smart contracts. As you say Rust doesn't necessarily seem like the sweetspot for this.

The Ethereum EVM assmebly is wildly unsafe but regularly used for the sake of gas and other things that would be impossible (most hilariously string manipulation). Solidity is unsafe with respect to things like overflow. It doesn't have memory unsafety in the traditional sense. Partly because it is allocate only and you don't have to deal with bounds checking yourself.