[chlorion]

It's true that it doesn't eliminate all bugs in general, but it can completely eliminate buffer overflows for example.

There is no excuse to not at least have bounds checking. This is one of the most basic memory safety problems and it's trivial to prevent.

Just preventing this small issue will prevent a non-trivial fraction of bugs. I don't have sudo's bug list on hand but I wouldn't be surprised if 25% or more are caused by buffer overflows.

So even if it doesn't prevent all logic bugs, it cuts out a pretty big chunk of the bug list.

>assuming you don't switch them off

You can't switch them off.

>Rust community's tendency to pitch this stuff as a security panacea

I've not seen anyone claim this so far.

[bunderbunder]

> You can't switch them off.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html

[Too]

I’d rather have safety default on with an opt-out, rather than the inverse that C gives you with -Werror -Wall -Weverything -Wyesireallymeanteverything. Compile it again one two different architectures, compile yet another time with clang-tidy and then static analysis with Coverity just to be sure. Run it with valgrind, asan and thread sanitizer. Sprinkle some fuzz testing on top.

Yet you still don’t the same level of confidence as a rust program that may have a small unsafe block in one corner of the code.

[chlorion]

From this link:

>It’s important to understand that unsafe doesn’t turn off the borrow checker or disable any other of Rust’s safety checks: if you use a reference in unsafe code, it will still be checked.

Unsafe rust basically just lets you use raw pointers, mutate static variables, use C-style unions, and do FFI calls, but otherwise it's exactly the same, and the safety checks are not in any way disabled.

The main thing is that pointers let you access whatever memory you want, and borrow checking the pointer value itself doesn't prevent this.

I don't think I would describe this as "switching them off", I would describe it as, "using raw pointers" or something along those lines.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

I feel pretty good about the fire safety measures at my apartment despite the fact that I own several lighters.

[timschmidt]

Even unsafe Rust comes with significantly more checks and safety built-in than C.