Comment by crote

> Use-after-free is still possible in Rust with unsafe

Of course! But in practice all potential bugs are neatly wrapped in small and easy-to-audit "unsafe" blocks, rather than silently lurking all over your codebase.

You could indeed wrap your entire codebase into one giant unsafe statement and write it like C. But, as the actix-web discussion showed years ago, the Rust community very much prefers restricting unsafe to the absolute bare minimum possible. You wouldn't write, say, a mail server in mostly-unsafe Rust for the same reason that you wouldn't write it in mostly-inline-assembly: you gain nothing, and in return it'll probably blow up in your face sooner rather than later.

Rust has an escape hatch because we're all adults. The big difference is that its footgun has an explicit safety latch, so you have to deliberately opt in to blowing your own foot off.