alt Hacker NewsAs someone who coded C++ (15+ years) and later Rust (about 4 years now) for my dayjob: there are more than those you listed I have seen commonly. Unaligned accesses is a perrenial favourite, as is ODR violations and reliance on the undefined order of static constructors between translation units. In C++ I didn't see much of unsafe casts, except related to enums (always specify an underlying type to mitigate this).
Rust protects against all of these, but if you think Rust is only about memory safety, I don't believe you have seriously tried it. It does a lot of things in std API design as well to steer you away from bugs. Some examples:
- The pervasive use of Result and Option makes it impossible to forget to handle (or forward) the error case.
- Because of usage of RAII (C++ has this too, but not as pervasively, C doesn't except using some very new GCC extension) it is very hard to forget to free resources such as files, sockets, database connections, mutexes, etc.
- Enums can carry payload in their variants (C devs: think tagged unions, but safe, C++ devs: think std::variant but with match/case rather than bulky visitor pattern), which means you can make API designs that cannot represent invalid states.
- The typestate pattern is a bit hard to explain briefly, but it allows a state machine with types at compile time, to make sure you dont misuse an API. For example it can be used to prevent forgetting setting required fields in a builder before building. Or in embedded microcontrollers to make sure you can't hand out the same GPIO pin to different parts of the code base.
I often find that my code in Rust works first try, while that almost never happen in C++ for non-trivial code. It is what all those Haskell devs were talking about all these years, but in a systems language (no GC is critical to my day job in hard realtime control systems) and without the incomprehensible abstract math lingo.
I was only speaking for C not C++ (I fled C++ a long time ago). My code usually works first try in C, but my experience also working with students is that you need to learn to use safe patterns and strategies first. I can imagine that Rust enforces those.
You can do a lot more in C too: You can design safe interfaces based around incomplete structure types. This also should allows what you call typestate pattern (if I understand it correctly). You can build a decent option type / result type. You can have a bounds safe vector type. You can have safe string types. One can have type-safe dynamic casts. One can annotate return values so that they can't be ignored. One can use many different tools for safety. People coming from C++ often think that one can not do this in C because "it lacks abstractions", but this is not really true.