This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater though.
You need unsafe to do some things in Rust, sure. But usually this code is isolated and auditable, and nowhere near the linecount of the rest of the application. Even the operating systems written in Rust have pretty conservative use of unsafe (redox, Phil's OS, etc). Most of your code won't be working with raw memory operations, most of it will work with zero-cost abstractions on top of raw memory.
> You need unsafe to do some things in Rust, sure.
And that's what I wrote.
> Most of your code won't be working with raw memory operations, most of it will work with zero-cost abstractions on top of raw memory.
For some web applications sure but industry is not constrained only to writing web applications especially if you want to get into C market space. In HPC or time/space constraint environments this matter.
I'm not talking about web applications. I'm talking about systems programming. Even the operating systems written in Rust use unsafe pretty conservatively. Servo uses unsafe mostly to talk to native libraries. Rust is used more for lower level programming than it is for webapps as far as I can tell.
You might want to define further what you mean by "raw memory here". Rust lets you work with arrays and vectors and the heap safely just fine. These are designed as zero-cost abstractions over raw memory (slices, Vec<T>, Box<T>). The equivalent C (with relevant bounds checks) wouldn't be any faster. Rust does not let you do things like call out directly to malloc/free safely. But that's okay. The existence of these abstractions means that you rarely have to do this.
> And that's what I wrote.
.... huh? that's exactly why I put "sure" there, that means I agree with that statement, what followed was why I disagree with the conclusions.
To add to this, I wrote a high a performance packet generator with 100% safe Rust code for a past internship. With the right backend, it could generate line-rate for a 10 Gbit/s NIC.
You need unsafe to do some things in Rust, sure. But usually this code is isolated and auditable, and nowhere near the linecount of the rest of the application. Even the operating systems written in Rust have pretty conservative use of unsafe (redox, Phil's OS, etc). Most of your code won't be working with raw memory operations, most of it will work with zero-cost abstractions on top of raw memory.