[tialaramex]

I agree with you that Rust isn't a perfect match for video game development. Jonathan Blow's Jai is targeting that sort of program, it's not offering Rust's safety promises (Jon is confident this doesn't matter) but it can hardly be less safe than C++.

However, the purpose of unsafe is to mark code that does something which a human needs to check for correctness. We're not saying "This isn't OK" but "The compiler can't check this is OK, so a person needs to do so". If you write C++ today, all of your code is like that. I'd be astonished if more than a tiny proportion of the actual game code in a modern video game needed that treatment in Rust.

For example, Rust's approach to late initialization is std::mem::MaybeUninit<T>, a wrapper type which says to the compiler hey, I am not initialized yet, it's OK to write a T value into me, but you can't read my value until somebody says they're done initializing me. The "say you're done initializing" part is indeed unsafe, but that's a small part of the program. That intern writing a zone preview gadget? They don't need to be writing unsafe initialization code, when they try to access preview_zone.orb_color the compiler tells them this is MaybeUninit and so they can't read it. "Huh, apparently orb_color is MaybeUninit ?" "Oh, just show all the orbs in preview as orange, it'll be fine". You just avoided Undefined Behaviour and possibly a trip to the land of "But it works in debug builds".