[wat10000]

Any reasonable meaning of “proper” would include not causing memory issues, so you’ve just defined away any problems. Note that this is substantially different from not having any problems.

The great lesson in software security of the past few decades is that you can’t just document “proper usage,” declare all other usage to be the programmer’s fault, and achieve anything close to secure software. You must have systems that either disallow unsafe constructs (e.g. rust preventing references from escaping at compile time) or can handle “improper usage” without allowing it to become a security vulnerability (e.g. sandboxing).

Correctly use your concurrency primitives and you won’t have thread safety bugs, hooray! And when was the last time you found a bug in C-family code caused by someone who didn’t correctly use concurrency primitives because the programmer incorrectly believed that a certain piece of mutable data would only be accessed on a single thread? I’ll give you my answer: it was yesterday. Quite likely the only reason it’s not today is because I have the day off.

[kanbankaren]

> And when was the last time you found a bug in C-family code caused by someone who didn’t correctly use concurrency primitives because the programmer incorrectly believed that a certain piece of mutable data would only be accessed on a single thread? I’ll give you my answer: it was yesterday.

You answered my question. My original argument was using concurrency primitives "properly" in C++ prevents memory issues and Rust isn't strictly necessary.

I have nothing against Rust. I will use it when they freeze the language and publish a ISO spec and multiple compilers are available.

[wat10000]

> My original argument was using concurrency primitives "properly" in C++ prevents memory issues

Yes, I know, I addressed that. It's true by definition, and a useless statement. Improper usage will happen. If improper usage results in security vulnerabilities, that means you will have security vulnerabilities.

Note that I say this as someone who makes a very good living writing C++ and has only dabbled in rust. I like C++ and it can be a good tool, but we must be clear-eyed about its downsides. "It's safe if you write correct code" is a longer way to say "it's unsafe."