Comment by veidr
1 day ago
I don't think you want to achieve any benefits of Rust in the initial port. Because at this scale you will definitely introduce new, and probably subtle, bugs that are not present in the Zig version.
You just want it to be the same, to the maximum extent the language allows. E.g. 1000+ unsafe is the right move, for now.
Reaping the benefits of Rust is for _future_ development.
That's my point - I don't see any hope of removing the 10,000+ unsafe calls, especially not one step at a time.
As such, this is a publicity stunt.
You could do, but maybe they never will. I have no idea.
But the point is, in 2027, 2028... your new code doesn't have to suffer from these frankly 1970s issues
You could also gradually fix the internals — if you wanted to
The irony being that machine-translation of code language also dates from the 1970's.