[miohtama]

> It's perfectly simple to trash memory in Rust.

What makes you think so? Most Rust programmers and programmers from other languages, agree that this is not possible. I might be missing something, but can you give an example of such simple methods to trash memory in Rust, asking from a curiosity standpoint?

[estebank]

I would assume they mean through the use of unsafe, which is true, but in practice unsafe code is less common than people that don't write Rust seem to think and tools like Miri help a lot to write unsafe that doesn't write to memory locations you weren't meant to.

[jaisjdkaaaej]

Perhaps they aren't writing Rust because those are the people that need to write unsafe code. Chicken and egg. I'm sure it you forced all the C programmers to switch to Rust you would see a lot more use of unsafe.

[estebank]

But there are plenty of projects out there that are written in Rust and have to deal directly with hardware and syscalls. Hubris, a kernel written in Rust has 94 files referencing unsafe[1] out of 414 total .rs files[2]. This is as "bad" a ratio as you're gonna encounter in a project. There are many valid reasons one can have to not use Rust. "I need a lot of unsafe" is not really one.

[1]: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aoxidecomputer%2Fhubris+un...

[2]: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aoxidecomputer%2Fhubris++l...

[stouset]

I don’t think most Rust programmers agree it’s impossible at all.

There’s always unsafe. I can make a pointer to anywhere by hand and write to it. That would involve some very intentional work, but I could do it if I wanted to.

[estebank]

There's a difference between "chamber a round, remove the safety, aim at the foot, shoot" and "open the kitchen faucet, leg gets blown off".

[stouset]

Yes of course. But the GP said it isn’t possible. It is. It’s not even hard.

But I did disclaim that it had to be somewhat intentional.