the mere naming of the keyword `unsafe` has been a wholly unintentional disaster for programming in general as more and more people use Rust, because "safe"/"safety"/"unsafe" are sort of emotionally-loaded words in English, and it's led to people to build mental heuristics about the pros and cons of "safe" and "unsafe" code which may be subtly incorrect. the language feature itself is completely reasonable of course, given the design decisions of the language, but as Andy said elsewhere in this comments thread:
> Rust evangelists need to be careful because in their zeal they have started to cause subtle errors in the general knowledge of how computers work in young people's minds. Ironically it's a form of memory corruption.
I'm not even a zig user or fan or anything and I don't have any real opinion about Rust, either, except for completely agreeing with this analysis based on how I've seen Rust evangelists talk online. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but it seems like it's just going to get worse over time as Rust becomes more popular and gains market share.
The term "memory safety" is much older than Rust and very common, the "unsafe" keyword is based on that existing concept and I think that consistency is the right choice here. I also don't have the impression that this is communicated in a way that leads to confusion with "correctness".
What alternative name would you prefer to express the collection of memory safety features in programming languages?
> Rust evangelists need to be careful because in their zeal they have started to cause subtle errors in the general knowledge of how computers work in young people's minds. Ironically it's a form of memory corruption.
I'm not even a zig user or fan or anything and I don't have any real opinion about Rust, either, except for completely agreeing with this analysis based on how I've seen Rust evangelists talk online. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but it seems like it's just going to get worse over time as Rust becomes more popular and gains market share.