Comment by dvt
16 hours ago
Let's say you want to call win32 (or Mac) OS functions, all of a sudden you're doing all kinds of wonky pointer stuff because that's how these operating systems have been architected. Doing unsafe stuff is pretty inevitable if you want to do anything non-hello-world-ish.
> Doing unsafe stuff is pretty inevitable if you want to do anything non-hello-world-ish.
So the vast majority of Rust projects involve writing at least one unsafe block? Is that really your claim?
And even if you do end up writing an unsafe block, that should be a massive flag that the code in said block should deserve extra comments on why it is safe, and extra unit tests on verifying that it does not blow up.
How do you know the unsafe operation is safe? What are the preconditions the code block has? Write it down, review it, test it.
Exactly; I feel like a lot of people seem to misunderstand what Rust is trying to solve. It's fundamentally not trying to make unsafe code impossible; it's making the number of places you need to audit it a tiny fraction of your codebase compared to needing to audit the entirety of a C or C++ codebase. When I'm doing code reviews, you'd better believe I'm going to spend some extra time on any unsafe block I see to figure out if it's necessary and if so, if it's actually safe safe (with the default assumption for both of those being that they're not until I can convince myself otherwise).
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Making use of win32 functions doesn't turn off bounds checking in your rust code.
A tiny fraction of programs need to use win32 or Mac OS functions beyond the standard library or other safe wrappers for said functions.
And even in those programs, only a fraction of the code in them is actually directly making calls to those APIs! Having everything else in safe code still makes it easier to audit than if the entire codebase is in C or C++.
So what? Just because you used the keyword `unsafe` to call an unsafe API does not mean that you are going to use unsafe pointer access to write to a vector.