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I agree. My point was that using a language whose compiler will not allow you to build your production binary if you make a certain mistake could have been one extra line of defense and who knows, that might have prevented this problem this one particular time.

But I am in full agreement with you that sloppy programmers cannot truly be helped. They just screw up and move on like nothing happened. Sigh.

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You can still do unsafe, and you do need unsafe in some cases.

OK, sure, but don't you think that being a world-wide antivirus vendor should have warranted a better process?

Oh absolutely. This is utterly unacceptable. The ease with which CS pushed willy nilly a bad build to prod in what seems to be a monophasic release is absurd.

Something of this nature would have had our entire team fired. The number of phases and the thoroughness and exhaustiveness of the protocols we have to ensure we don't push bad builds would have most engineers taken aback... but we have to. With great power comes great responsibility.

And human beings can indeed write safe "unsafe" code. But to do so consistently, you have to be very smart, very cautious, and somewhat lucky.

Indeed, ensuring that unsafe is isolated and obeys certain semantics is a superpower that few languages have rust+kani is a good and modern way to achieve this.

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