> Like gardening, but with more segfaults.
interesting, I'm new to rust. what are you doing that necessitates using unsafe?
interesting, I'm new to rust. what are you doing that necessitates using unsafe?
C pointers can have as many owners as you want, may be subjected to mathematical operations, and can be cast to any type without even an error message. The compiler will just assume you know what you're doing. If you enable enough compiler warnings, it might warn you, but C compilers don't generate a lot of those by default.
Rust will let you only generate one mutable (exclusive) reference at a time. This means straight C to Rust ports simply don't compile.
By switching to pointers, which work pretty much like their C equivalent, you can port the code much easier, but you do of course lose the benefits of Rust's safety mechanisms, because most pointer operations throw away all the safety guarantee that Rust provides.
Safe Rust includes many forms of shared mutability, including Cell<> which is perhaps the closest comparison to typical patterns in C code.
In C you only see the flags people know of or remembered to plant. There's an awful lot of mines left unflagged and sometimes you step on them.
It's very obvious to me which would be more safe and I find myself questioning why it is isn't so obvious to others.