I don't think there's a lot to talk about, I can respect your views, and I'll admit I don't write Rust, I've never written any Rust. I mainly write in GO (which has annoying guard rails of it own), TypeScript, C, and a few other minor languages to round out my common use toolbox.

This happened within the last 20-minutes, a Jr Dev was showing me something they wrote that was “optimization”, “performant” and “safe”. It was slow, glitchy, and unusable, why? TypeScript / JavaScript memory handling. I showed her exactly why it was happening, and how to fix it, and the fix was really to set a bunch of variable to null, and use deep cloning in another area to make sure the memory was cleaned up enough the GC could do its job.

Have a rocking holiday season. :)

Fine, let's use your exact quote, it won't change anything.

Let's break it down into two parts:

Yes, they can, but you can't say they're useless because people can drive without them. The problem is, when people suggest languages are memory safe, they fall back on claiming that “memory safety” is a catch-all. What they're outright stating is they lack the skill, knowledge and ability to do a job, and think that incompetence is a defence because of a “safety” feature for something they don't know how to do. It's the same as saying: “My car has seat belts, therefore my car can't get in an accident.”, which again is the statement I made. If you know how to work with memory, you'll never brag and evangelize the “memory safety”. If you know how to drive, you'll never evangelize the seat belt, even if you wear it.

Now this part is just objectively wrong. Anyone claiming the "memory safety" is some incredible safety net that has trivialized program design, removing the actual design portion, is wrong. You can see Rust fans doing this, again, follow Lunduke, he shows people doing this. He showed a tweet where someone claimed that once a Rust program or library is developed it is bug free, and complete by the sheer glory of Rust.

If you summarzie this, you get to the point I made, where Rust fans seem to have this belief that simply wearing a seat belt prevents an accident, when it doesn't, can't, and the real issue is they're just clueless idiots when they act like that. You don't need me to show you this, again, Lunduke, he covers it, alot, and it's objectively true.

The reason I'm pushing back against that label, it's used by people as a catch-all. The number of Jr Engineers, or Jr Developers, who I've heard use “memory safe” as an excuse, is ridiculous. If you don't know how to work with memory, and you think the compiler is going to save you from writing good code, you're not a good developer / engineer.

The idea is cute, but it's never once panned out from my experience, if you don't know how to work with memory, learn? Now, for the people who aren't pushing Rust as the new saviour of programming, that's fine, but it's the hardline idiots I'm pushing back on. Just learn how to program, and you'll be fine.

If you really want to try being “memory safe”, grab C, and write a library management system for memory, and have fun.

Nope, but I don't make the claim that they exist. To be fair, some might, I don't know, but to me it's absolute statement.

I wouldn't call any of those language memory safe because they're objectively not memory safe.

That's fine, but remove the “memory safe” label. The “unsafe” keyword is important because it signifies you can't actually be memory safe, performant, and a system language. If you owned a company that produced “nut-free” food, you can't also have products which contain nuts, and always carry on that you are absolutely hardcode nut-free. If your customer base was doing that on your behalf, you should be coming out and publicly making statements that you do not endorse or support that label, and its customer created.

Your other comment, he gets a lot of hate for simply suggesting Rust is not some super language that should take over the world. He makes objectively true statements, isn't biased about it, and holy crap, gets absolutely destroy because of it. I've never tried Rust, I'm not concerned with Rust, but from what I know of its public image, it's the ultra memory safe, system safe, solver of all, language, and time after time, isn't. That's my point.

Which boils down to the paraphrased statement: “Seat belts prevent accidents.”, which get the appropriate answer of “Except that no one claims seat belts prevents accidents” because I've never heard anyone say that, or claim that, or have heard that third party.

I can show you people stating this about Rust, Lunduke covers Rust, fairly, openly and without bias. His coverage is open, so it's easy to find, and I don't really need more evidence than that, being the polarized reactions he gets. I don't know if Rust is good or bad, haven't written a single line of it, but I can see the reactions of its followers, and it's not positive. Maybe Rust is excellent, but it's not memory safe, objectively, and it can never claim that it is, as memory safe is absolute, which means the "unsafe" keyword has to be removed.

Just checkout Lunduke's coverage of Rust, and you can see what I'm referring to. He's literally gotten death threats over suggesting Rust might not be the perfect solution for every single possible problem.

Just watch Lunduke and you can see all the radical Rust fans that swear up and down Rust has solved any possible concept of system related errors or corruption. Memory safety is absolute, you can't just say “We're memory safe, except when we or you, or something, decides to turn it off.”. That's like saying: “Are products are 100% nut free, unless you find a nut.”.

I'm not influenced by it, I'm going by the popular nonsense slogans of Rust, and the major one is memory safety.

Exactly, and they think that because it's “memory safe” you can't do dumb shit with memory. The problem was never the memory safety, it was the developer, and I understand that we find bugs 10+ years on in programs / libraries like Grub and OpenSSL, but thats the reality of software development.

If that's true, fair enough, I don't know.

You'll have some people get annoyed, or possibly mad, but you will not have groups of people calling for death and extreme violence. I know “harder aligned” C programmers, or, Perl (dear lord), but nothing like Rust. People suggest that Rust might not be the best fit for a project, and look what happens publicly. I've had a tiff with a developer about Perl, but it was civil, Rust devotion isn't civil.

Except that no one claims seat belts prevents accidents, and with Rust people do claim Rust prevents any possibility of an error, or memory corruption. That's why this needs to be called out, the pure stupidity of the hardcore Rust or die group. The group that calls for death and extreme violence against people who simply suggest that Rust might not be the greatest created language of all time, and who doubt the stated claims of pure and absolute safety. You can prove this, just watch video from Lunduke, it's objective.

You could make the same claim about C, it's memory safe, except when it's not. The narrative of Rust was that it's memory safe to a level that the concept of memory based corrupt or memory nonsense is no longer possible. Obviously, that's a ridiculous claim to make, but so many people believed it, to the point they were willing to commit violence against anyone who dared question the divine nature of Rust memory safety. Lunduke has proven that, he gets death threats when he makes objectively true, and harmless statements about Rust.