[chongli]

Because memory vulnerabilities don't make programs immune to other dumb mistakes. You get these vulnerabilities on top of everything else that can go wrong in a program.

The issue is that these great new tools don't just fix the old vulnerabilities, they also provide a lot of new, powerful footguns for people to play with. They're shipping 2000 feet of rope with every language when all we need is 6 feet to hang ourselves.

[pornel]

There has been a bunch of failed C killers, and C++ has massively shat the bed, so I understand that people are jaded.

However, this pessimistic tradeoff is just not true in case of Rust — it has been focused from the start on preventing footguns, and actually does a great job of it. You don't trade one kind of failure for another, you replace them with compilation errors, and they've even invested a lot of effort into making these errors clear and useful.