alt Hacker News> The unsafe keyword is being redesigned
OK, I see a lot of C# code often and over a long time.
I see the "unsafe" keyword used approximately never.
I'm sure that this is useful for some cases. But not everyday things for most of us. If we did use it, it would be carefully isolated in a library for a specific purpose.
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pjmlp • today at 2:37 PM
Many of us use it in scenarios where others would write a blog post about a rewrite in Rust, C++ or whatever.
CLR was designed to support languages like C++, yet many don't learn the knobs.
This moves C# to a more modern systematic understanding of what this keyword is for, but it'll remain very rare in C# the same way it's rare in Rust, and presumably in Swift.
The choice of keyword "unsafe" is partly psychological. Turns out if you called this exact same feature "trusted" or whatever the programmers don't have the appropriate feelings about it. They want to write trusted code, they don't want to write unsafe code, so making them write the keyword "unsafe" provides that psychological disincentive.