[kelnos]

> C and particularly C++ absolutely have that ability with library support if you know what you are doing.

I won't speak to C++, as it's a very different language now since the last time I used it. I've been writing C for more than 20 years, and I still make mistakes. And there's nothing keeping me from accidentally doing something unsafe outside my unsafe abstraction, aside from my own perfection at never making mistakes (yeah, right).

Rust requires you to be explicit about the unsafe things you do. And, realistically, even when I'm building a safe interface on top of necessarily-unsafe code, the unsafe portions aren't even that large compared to the entirety of the abstraction. That makes things much easier to audit, and the compiler tells me which sections of code I need to pay more attention to.

To me, this is lacking the ability. "If you know what you are doing" is a laughable constraint. Even people who theoretically do (and I suspect programming ability is a lot like people's self-reported skill at driving a car) still make mistakes sometimes.