[oaw-bct-ar-bamf]

It might not help you today with your immediate problem but think about it this way:

You become the boss or responsible for some product. If you decide at the beginning to start off using Rust or rewrite some ancient, unmaintained library using Rust, then you prevent people like your cowboy developer to mess stuff up with this category of faults.

Either you would not hire him in the first place because he never came to grips with Rust so you only end up with developers on your team that understand and actively chose the tradeoffs that Rust offers.

[foobarian]

If the cowboy developer is the boss they can still just wrap everything in unsafe blocks. But I think I'd take that over the C++ new/delete/malloc/free salad.

[orangeboats]

At least `unsafe` blocks tend to raise other people's eyebrows rather quickly. The word itself is telling you to take a double take after all.

Some rather "questionable" C/C++ code can, and are missed during code review sessions. One could put the blame on code reviewers, but let's be honest, code reviewing is a mindnumbing task for many of us.