alt Hacker News> the fundamental model that the Rust compiler and standard library attempt to implement is safe and correct by construction
This comes up a lot as a defensive argument too, but it's also pretty frustrating, because Rust's "fundamental model" is not a thing that really exists. There are project proposals to create one (such as https://goals.rust-lang.org/2026/roadmap-project-zero.html#), but at the moment it's just a vague set of vibes people gesture towards to dismiss all the problems with Rust-as-actually-implemented.
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I mean it would be nice to make one of those, but I also don't really see the point of doing so besides shutting up the guys who like to talk about how Rust doesn't have a spec, most of whom do not even seem involved in the language really? Nobody really has an issue with the current situation, they are all clearly bugs and they more or less get triaged appropriately.
Calling it "vibes" is just so unserious.
If you would like the Rust language to have a formal specification, I would suggest you look at ways to help that happen. There is already the Ferrocene[1] project.
The safety model of Rust is extremely well described in detail. It's not particularly hard to understand, either. Are you worried that there is some kind of fundamental flaw in the design, we're just waiting to discover it, and it will all come crumbling down? My suggestion would be to start by understanding Rust's type system and why it works the way it does, and you will very quickly build an intuition ("vibes") that it obviously works.
[1]: https://ferrocene.dev/