[steveklabnik]

Every programming language has parts like Rust’s unsafe. In managed languages, that code is contained in the runtime, or in FFI.

In a practical sense, in order to not have “unsafe” code, the language specification would have to contain a full formal specification of every aspect that it’s running on. The hardware, the system software you rely on, everything. That isn’t a good idea, so no language does it. And it doesn’t help you when new hardware comes out.

In a more formal sense, you run into things like Rice’s theorem.

[OutOfHere]

> Every programming language has parts like Rust’s unsafe.

This is a pretty weak argument. "Everyone else does it, so it's not wrong." If using this argument, Rust shouldn't even exist.

Rice's theorem seems handwavy in the real-world limitations of its restrictions. For the sake of argument, even Python is more memory-safe than unsafe Rust.