C# is not more safe than Rust is and falls to prevent null pointer exceptions and modified collection exceptions.
By design, Rust requires unsafe code to implement any non-trivial data structures (except trivial POD types). This applies to both Rust standard library, and third-party crates.
The issue is not a theory, security bugs actually happened in reality. Here’s an example about the Rust standard library: https://shnatsel.medium.com/how-rusts-standard-library-was-v...
By contrast, thanks to the VM and the GC, C# allows to implement very complicated data structures without any unsafe code or unmanaged interop. The standard library is also implemented in idiomatic memory-safe subset of the language. For example, here’s the hash map: https://source.dot.net/#System.Private.CoreLib/src/libraries...
> falls to prevent null pointer exceptions and modified collection exceptions
Yes indeed, but these exceptions are very unlikely to cause security bugs in the software.
According to bing.com chat, https://github.com/dotnet/runtime has 3.5M LOC, and https://github.com/rust-lang/rust has 6M LOC. The right panel of https://github.com/dotnet/runtime says 80% of the .NET runtime is written in C#.
This makes me wonder, do you happen to have a link for your “vastly outweighs” statement?
Now if we remove in tree tests from the totals, we arrive at 1.5M lines of C++ (most tests are written in C# as you would expect) and 1.7M lines of Rust.
However, this does not exclude safe Rust code. I don't have a tool off hand that can provide a precise count of lines of unsafe code but we can get some general estimates. There are 1958 instances of "unsafe fn" out of 103,205 instances of "fn ". Further there are 11,545 instances of "unsafe " in the Rust repo while there are 10,768 instances of "unsafe " in the runtime repo.
Given that unsafe functions comprise less than 2% of all functions in the Rust repo, I think my claims are reasonable.
Also plenty of crates are bindings to C and C++ libraries with nice unsafe blocks.
Then was that Axium drama.
The point is the "look at what I say, not what I do", when talking about safe languages and dependencies into C and C++ libraries and compiler toolchains.
When Rust gets fully bootstrapped in self hosted toolchain you'll have a point.
That seems like a gross overstatement.
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/library/std/sr...
CTRL-F: unsafe
Only one result, an optional utility function: "pub unsafe fn get_many_unchecked_mut"
There's far more unsafe there: https://github.com/rust-lang/hashbrown/blob/f2e62124cd947b5e...