Comment by tadfisher
5 hours ago
Because they view "unsafe" as an escape hatch instead of a feature. It's a way to encapsulate dangerous behavior, tightly, with clear postcondiitions. Sometimes it's the only way to do things like interact with inherently unsafe FFI code, or hardware.
I adore unsafe, appreciate it as a feature... but it is an escape hatch. One that is sometimes necessary, one that is sometimes not necessary but might still be (ab)used for performance, or initial 1:1 porting of C/C++ code. There are a lot of cases where that escape hatch should probably welded shut though. Fortunately, the Rust ecosystem has tools like `cargo geiger`, and straight out of the box I can also write:
I feel like this perpetuates a bad mental model. Unsafe is not an escape hatch. Code within unsafe blocks must uphold the same semantics as code outside it but the compiler cannot guarantee that those semantics are upheld.
If we're using analogies, `unsafe` is like a "hard hat required" sign. There's nothing intrinsically different about the space inside or outside of it, other than that you can't be sure a brick isn't going to fall on your head once you cross over. So it's on you to wear a hard hat. And to not drop any bricks and trust other people to do their best not to drop any bricks.
You wouldn't call that an escape hatch.