Comment by alphaalpha101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alphaalpha101 | Hacker News Reader

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Rust doesn't ensure memory safety or safe concurrency. It ensures memory safety - including data race safety, just one part of safe concurrency - assuming you never use any unsafe code and that the standard library is free of bugs. I'm happy to assume the standard library is free of memory safety bugs, because you have to trust something.

But I'm not happy trusting that dependencies aren't using unsafe code, and I'm not happy claiming that Rust ensures safety, when it ensures safety only if you assume that unsafe blocks aren't unsafe.

The problem is that you can't check unsafe blocks locally. Checking that each individual unsafe block doesn't have undefined behaviour requires checking the entire programme.

It's better than nothing, without a doubt, but it isn't safe.

Unsafe blocks are infectious, that's true, but it's possible to write safe APIs that limit that infectiousness to a single module. For example, even though Vec's implementation is crazy unsafe, you don't have to audit all the uses of Vec in safe programs -- a local audit of the Vec code can prove what we need to prove. This is the biggest benefit of the lifetime system and the borrow checker, that when we write piles of unsafe code, we can force safe callers to maintain our invariants.

You can prove it, but you can also prove that a C++ programme has no memory safety bugs. And there are a lot of languages where you don't have to, where it's simply impossible to get memory safety bugs (assuming the runtime is safe).

For nontrivial libraries that use a lot of unsafe, it really is very difficult to know that all the uses of unsafe don't interact in some way to create unsafety. The scoped lock that had a problem in Rust 1.0 (or just before it?) is an example.

You can force callers to maintain your invariants in C++ too, simply by using some basic safety. Yes people can still do things that are obviously visually unsafe in code and undefined, but that's not a serious issue.

I still think Rust is better here. Don't get me wrong. But it's very hyped as 'safe and fast' when it just isn't safe.

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