[efficax]

> Some things I even never managed to be able to express in Rust, even if trivial in C, so I just rely on having a C core library for the hot path, and use it from Rust.

i can’t think of anything you can do in c that you can’t do in unsafe rust, and that has the advantage that you can both narrow it down to exactly where you need it and only there, and your can test it in miri to find bugs

[LegionMammal978]

To be fair, unsafe Rust has an entirely new set of idiosyncrasies that you have to learn for your code not to cause UB. Most of them revolve around the many ways in which using references can invalidate raw pointers, and using raw pointers can invalidate references, something that simply doesn't exist in C apart from the rarely-used restrict qualifier.

(In particular, it's very easy to inadvertently trigger the footgun of converting a pointer to a reference, then back to a pointer, so that using the original pointer again can invalidate the new pointer.)

Extremely pointer-heavy code is entirely possible in unsafe Rust, but often it's far more difficult to correctly express what you want compared to C. With that in mind, a tightly-scoped core library in C can make a lot of sense; more lines of unsafe code in either language leave more room for bugs to slip in.

[Galanwe]

> i can’t think of anything you can do in c that you can’t do in unsafe rust

That is not my point.

There is a world between "you can do it" and "you will do it".

Some things in Rust are doable in theory, but end up being so insane to implement that you won't do it in practice. That is my point.