[pcwalton]

> 1 - If memory management is a serious problem for the software you work on, I've never found the boost library lacking. This seems like the main selling point for RUST.

When use-after-free becomes a security concern that commonly leads to remote code execution, as it is for us in the browser space, it becomes very apparent just how inadequate modern C++ is at the task. Everything works fine, the tests pass, people use it in production, and yet all the time someone discovers some way to make the stars align to produce a use-after-free bug. This has happened over and over again, despite all the smart pointers and modern C++ techniques.

The fact is that modern C++ just isn't memory safe, and after digging deep into the problem to try to solve it with Rust I'm convinced now that it can never be. The language just has too many core features, such as references, iterators, and the "this" pointer, that cannot be made memory safe without sacrificing backwards compatibility.