alt Hacker NewsAnd do you say that C offers these guarantees ?
Real world C software does not read like software written by people who are in fact upholding those guarantees you say C could equally have. It reads as though they think such a guarantee is a joke or an irrelevance. It's not rare for me to run into people who think C's pointers are just indexing into a massive array of all RAM (or its equivalent on today's systems with virtual addressing), that's not just not in the same ballpark as a safe C program, that's playing a different sport on another continent.
You seem to be suggesting that a language being safe or unsafe is a social contract rather than a technical property of the language.
>And do you say that C offers these guarantees ?
No, that would be silly, and it's an illustration of why it is silly to say that a language guarantees X if it is the programmer who must check that X holds. If we go down that route (which, to repeat, would be silly), then we can make C safe without any technical changes just by adding some language to the standard saying that C programmers are obliged to ensure that their code maintains a certain list of invariants. When you say that "Rust makes the same guarantees regardless of the unsafe keyword", it seems to me that you are doing something equally pointless.