alt Hacker NewsTrue, if you do pointer arithmetic on C strings or similar low-level buffer operations without introducing safe abstractions, there is basically no way to do this safely.
True, if you do pointer arithmetic on C strings or similar low-level buffer operations without introducing safe abstractions, there is basically no way to do this safely.
And I think that illustrates my point well. Yes there is MISRA C++ and CERT for C when you write safety critical code. But that is a lot of extra rules to follow and remember (and have linting tools check where possible). It is basically a entirely separate dialect of the parent languages. And if you aren't doing safety critical you won't be dealing with these but have to come up with your own (company specific or individual) rules. (You dont want to write MISRA C++ unless you have to, large parts of it are quite miserable).
In Rust I get good defaults, and a language that guides me in the right direction. The rules for safety critical rules are somewhat still under development but so far they look a lot shorter (you still need the "don't allocate in hard realtime tasks except at startup" and similar rules for example). And if you aren't doing safety critical you can safely use all of the language as long as you stay away from unsafe.
And for most code you dont need unsafe, and even when you do someone else has likely done the hard work for you already, providing safe abstractions on top. (The exception is FFI to other languages, it is impossible to avoid unsafe when calling code in another language that the compiler can't reason about, you should build a safe Rust API on top of the raw bindings. For popular libraries this often already exists.)