If rust is so inflexible that it requires the use of unsafe to solve problems, that's still rust's fault. You have to consider both safe rust behaviour as well as necessary unsafe code.
This is sort of the exact opposite of reality: the point of safe Rust is that it's safe so long as Rust's invariants are preserved, which all other safe Rust preserves by construction. So you only need to audit unsafe Rust code to ensure the safety of a Rust codebase.
(The nuance being that sometimes there's a lot of unsafe Rust, because some domains - like kernel programming - necessitate it. But this is still a better state of affairs than having no code be correct by construction, which is the reality with C.)
I've written lots of `forbid(unsafe_code)` in Rust; it depends on where in the stack you are and what you're doing.
But as the adjacent commenter notes: having unsafe is not inherently a problem. You need unsafe Rust to interact with C and C++, because they're not safe by construction. This is a good thing!
Ultimately every program depends on things beyond any compilers ability to verify, for example the calls to code not written in that language being correct, or even more fundamentally if you're writing some embedded program that literally has interfaces to foreign code at all the silicon (both that handles IO and that which does the computation) being correct.
The promise of rust isn't that it can make this fundamentally non-compiler-verifiable (i.e. unsafe) dependency go away, it's that you can wrap the dependency in abstractions that make it safe for users of the dependency if the dependency is written correctly.
In most domains rust don't necessitate writing new unsafe code, you rely on the existing unsafe code in your dependencies that is shared, battle tested, and reasonably scoped. This is all rust, or any programming langauge, can promise. The demand that the dependency tree has no unsafe isn't the same as the domain necessitating no unsafe, it's the impossible demand that the domain of writing the low level abstractions that every domain relies on doesn't need unsafe.
Almost all of them. It would be far shorter to list the domains which require unsafe. If you're seeing programmers reach for unsafe in most projects, either you're looking at a lot of low level hardware stuff (which does require unsafe more often than not), or you are seeing cases where unsafe wasn't required but the programmer chose to use it anyway.
Ultimately all software has to touch hardware somewhere. There is no way to verify that the hardware always does what it is supposed to be because reality is not a computer. At the bottom of every dependency tree in any Rust code there always has to be unsafe code. But because Rust is the way it is those interfaces are the only places you need to check for incorrectly written code. Everywhere else that is just using safe code is automatically correct as long as the unsafe code was correct.
And that is fine, because those upstream deps can locally ensure that those sections are correct without any risk that some unrelated code might mis-safely use them unsafely. There is an actual rigorous mathematical proof of this. You have no such guarantees in C/C++.
> Any large Rust project I check has tons of unsafe in its dependency tree.
This is an argument against encapsulation. All Rust code eventually executes `unsafe` code, because all Rust code eventually interacts with hardware/OS/C-libraries. This is true of all languages. `unsafe` is part of the point of Rust.
And all of it is eventually run on an inherently unsafe CPU.
I cannot understand why we are continuing to have to re-litigate the very simple fact that small, bounded areas of potential unsafety are less risky and difficult to audit than all lines of code being unsafe.
It's just moving the goalposts. "If it compiles it works" to "it eliminates all memory bugs" to "well, it's safer than c...".
If Rust doesn't live up to its lofty promises, then it changes the cost-benefit analysis. You might give up almost anything to eliminate all bugs, a lot to eliminate all memory bugs, but what would you give up to eliminate some bugs?
Can you show me an example of Rust promising "if it compiles it works"? This seems like an unrealistic thing to believe, and I've never heard anybody working on or in Rust claim that this is something you can just provide with absolute confidence.
The cost-benefit argument for Rust has always been mediated by the fact that Rust will need to interact with (or include) unsafe code in some domains. Per above, that's an explicit goal of Rust: to provide sound abstractions over unsound primitives that can be used soundly by construction.
> Can you show me an example of Rust promising "if it compiles it works"? [...] and I've never heard anybody working on or in Rust claim that this is something you can just provide with absolute confidence.
I have heard it and I've stated it before. It's never stated in absolute confidence. As I said in another thread, if it was actually true, then Rust wouldn't need an integrated unit testing framework.
It's referring to the experience that Rust learners have, especially when writing relatively simple code, that's it tends to be hard to misuse libraries in a way that looks correct and compiles but actually fails at runtime. Rust cannot actually provide this guarantee, it's impossible in any language. However there are a lot of common simple tasks (where there's not much complex internal logic that could be subtly incorrect) where the interfaces provided by libraries they're depending on are designed to leverage the type system such that it's difficult to accidentally misuse them.
Like something like not initializing a HTTP client properly. The interfaces make it impossible to obtain an improperly initialized client instance. This is an especially distinct feeling if you're used to dynamic languages where you often have no assurances at all that you didn't typo a field name.
I've seen (and said) "if it compiles it works," but only when preceded by softening statements like "In my experience," or "most of the time." Because it really does feel like most of the time, the first time your program compiles, it works exactly the way you meant it to.
I can't imagine anybody seriously making that claim as a property of the language.
Yeah, I think the experiential claim is reasonable. It's certainly my experience that Rust code that compiles is more confidence-inspiring than Python code that syntax-checks!
6 days ago: Their experience with Rust was positive for all the commonly cited reasons - if it compiles it works
8 days ago: I have to debug Rust code waaaay less than C, for two reasons: (2) Stronger type system - you get an "if it compiles it works" kind of experience
4 months ago: I've been writing Rust code for a while and generally if it compiles, it works.
5 months ago: If it’s Rust, I can just do stuff and I’ve never broken anything. Unit tests of business logic are all the QA I need. Other than that, if it compiles it works.
9 months ago: But even on a basic level Rust has that "if it compiles it works" experience which Go definitely doesn't.
Some people claim that the quote is hyperbolic because it only covers memory errors. But this bug is a memory error, so ...
GP isn't asking for examples of just anyone making that statement. They're asking for examples of Rust making that promise. Something from the docs or the like.
> Some people claim that the quote is hyperbolic because it only covers memory errors. But this bug is a memory error, so ...
It's a memory error involving unsafe code, so it would be out of scope for whatever promises Rust may or may not have made anyways.
I've also said it, with the implication that the only remaining bugs are likely to be ones in my own logic. Like, suppose I'm writing a budget app and haven't gone to the lengths of making Debit and Credit their own types. I can still accidentally subtract a debit from a balance instead of adding to it. But unless I've gone out of my way to work around Rust's protections, e.g. with unsafe, I know that parts of my code aren't randomly mutating immutables, or opening up subtle use-after-free situations, etc. Now I can spend all my time concentrating on the program's logic instead of tracking those other thousands of gotchas.
It's not moving the goalposts at all. I'm not a Rust programmer, but for years the message has been the same. It's been monotonous and tiring, so I don't know why you think it's new.
Safe Rust code is safe. You know where unsafe code is, because it's marked as unsafe. Yes, you will need some unsafe code in an notable project, but at least you know where it is. If you don't babysit your unsafe code, you get bad things. Someone didn't do the right thing here and I'm sure there will be a post-mortem and lessons learned.
To be comparable, imagine in C you had to mark potentially UB code with ub{} to compile. Until you get that, Rust is still a clear leader.
That's like saying that if c is so inflexible it requires the use of inline assembly to solve problems, it's C's fault if inline assembly causes undefined behavior.
> If rust is so inflexible that it requires the use of unsafe to solve problems...
Thankfully, it doesn't. There are very few situations which require unsafe code, though a kernel is going to run into a lot of those by virtue of what it does. But the vast majority of the time, you can write Rust programs without ever once reaching for unsafe.
What's the alternative that preserves safe-by-default while still allowing unlimited flexibility to accidentally break things? I mean, Rust allows inline assembly because there are situations where you absolutely must execute specific opcodes, but darned if I want that to be the common case.
Yes. When writing unsafe, you have to assume you can never trust anything coming from safe rust. But you are also provided far fewer rakes to step on when writing unsafe, and you (ideally) are writing far fewer lines of unsafe code in a Rust project than you would for equivalent C.
Rust is written in Rust, and we still want to be able to e.g. call C code from Rust. (It used to be the case that external C code was not always marked unsafe, but this was fixed recently).
samdoesnothing is making a legitimate point about needing to consider prevalence of unsafe inna Rust program. That he's being downvoted to hell is everything wrong with HN.
(The nuance being that sometimes there's a lot of unsafe Rust, because some domains - like kernel programming - necessitate it. But this is still a better state of affairs than having no code be correct by construction, which is the reality with C.)