this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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IME Rust programs crash at about the same rate as other languages. "Rewrite everything in Rust" hasn't made much of a difference for me, so far.
A crash is different to a SEGFAULT. I'd be very surprised to see a safe rust program segfault unless it was actively exploiting a compiler bug.
Sure. I haven't seen a proper segfault from any modern, post-C/C++ language in ages. I've never seen a Go program segfault, or a Nim one (although, there are comparatively few of those as a sample size).
So, it seems to me that - purely from the perspective of a user of programs - Rust still seems about as safe as any other modern language - since I've seen no other modern (say, created in the past decade) compiled language segfault. Even the C segfaults seem to be largely becoming rare occurrences, which I have to chalk up to better tooling, because I highly doubt that there's been some magical increase in general C programmer quality in the intervening years.
Yes, the problems rust is solving are already solved under different constraints. This is not a spicy take.
The world isn't clamoring to turn a go app into rust specifically for the memory safety they both enjoy.
Systems applications are still almost exclusively written in C & C++, and they absolutely do run into memory bugs. All the time. I work with C almost exclusively for my day job (with shell and rust interspersed), and while tried and tested C programs have far fewer memory bugs than when they were first made, that means the bugs you do find are by their nature more painful to diagnose. Eliminating a whole class of problems in-language is absolutely worth the hype.