Comment by ssokolow
2 days ago
Bearing in mind that "there should be no room for a language above assembly and below Rust" (i.e. something like what C or C++ is to Python, Java, C#, etc.) was an intentional design decision for Rust which resulted in `unsafe`.
It seems very common for people to misunderstand that having strict accounting for unsafe is part of why Rust does what it does so well rather than just disallowing unsafe outright. I think it's easily confused because being able to choose "how much unsafe do I want to allow, and where do I want to allow it" allows the choice "I don't want any in my own code" to be easily enforced, and that's by far the most common amount needed, but it's certainly not the only useful one. Being able to handle the edge cases without having to give up the checks entirely is a huge improvement over most alternatives.
Actually there is, given that the reference compiler depends on C++.