Comment by someonebaggy
6 hours ago
It's possible to write safe code in C or C++ but it's extremely difficult to read existing code and prove it's safe, without using as much effort as it takes to write it in the first place. This includes the code you wrote last month whose surrounding code has changed. And you have to be right every time while the attacker only needs you to be wrong once. The problem is not writing the code, it is continually verifying it.
As someone who worked professionally with both C++ and Rust, I mostly agree with this, but I would say that writing the concurrent code in C++ is also hard.
The only way I found that works reliably is stick to a small well defined set of mostly safe primitives. E.g. at work we use message passing / event bus architecture everywhere, which works great for a robotics / industrial context. But even then, if you somehow mess up and have a variable accessed from event handlers in two different threads, it is tough to spot other than if you get lucky and observe it with a build using TSAN.
With rust that class of mistakes is just entirely eliminated, which makes it easier to to concentrate on the hard things that actually matter (like the domain specific logic).