I do. Am I a bad programmer?
> The types of problems you solve by introducing built-in string types and vectors aren’t problems in the first place.
Buffer overflows aren't problems?
What i’d want is a generic support for preventing buffer overflows, or bad memory access where i need it. Writing my own growable data type using malloc and free is something i can do once, and i just have it, it’s not something that i have to worry about for more than 5 minutes at the beginning of a project.
You have that.
For example, if you have contiguous memory, the various forms of the [T] slice type can be used, they don't impose any allocation expectations. (And, once the standard library allows pluggable allocators, you'll likely be able to use Vec directly, for a growable vector type.)
If you don't have contiguous memory, then it's a bit more work, but one can still use features like generics and privacy to spend a few lines building abstractions that bounds check in the right places. It's not like using a proof language to extract a program that is guaranteed to have no out of bounds accesses, or a compiler that some how deduces what the bounds of your data structure is, but the former has its own complexity downsides, and the latter seems infeasible, in general.
Generics and privacy are definitely language features, and they're core to the ease with which one can create abstractions. Rust is a systems language, it tries to give programmers the power to create their own safe abstractions as needed.
> though i don't see how that differs from a generic accessor method or an overloaded operator
Err, it does all the bounds checking automatically? I thought you wanted these features without having to implement them yourself, but apparently writing accessor methods or an overloaded operator is OK too?!?
We actually used to implement Vec as a language feature, and it was a lot of work to write things like growth in raw LLVM IR (which is a miserable programming language) instead of just using a real programming language—Rust—to do it.