If you drive a car, have you read the entire owner's manual for every car you've owned? If you're a homeowner, how about your hvac system? What about your system shell? Your compiler(s)?

At some point you need your tools to be intuitive enough that you don't need to read an entire manual in order to do your work.

It's neither arbitrary nor magic; it's math. And unsafe doesn't disable the type system, it just lets you dereference raw pointers.

This headline is based on responses to the question "what are your biggest worries about the future of Rust", not "are you worried about the future of Rust." So of course most of the respondents answered with a concern about the language.

Do you take this sentence seriously, or not?

I will do everything I can do to stop this.

As far as I can tell, "this" here refers to literally any Rust code that isn't constrained within a specific driver. That does indeed seem like a full-on attempt to stop the R4L project entirely.

He does appear to have a real technical concern regarding maintainability.

"Appear" is doing some heavy lifting there. Opponents of the R4L project always couch their objections in technical concerns. For what it's worth, I can't actually find any concerns of merit or substance in that particular thread, although navigating mailing list threads is honestly pretty error-prone, so I may have missed it.

It had a reasonably clear warning, though; a screenshot is included in this response from the devs. But note that the response also links to another issue where some bikeshedding on the warning occurred and the warning was ultimately improved.

It would be a valid point if he weren't literally speaking over the people trying to tell him that they're not demanding he learn Rust: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?si=b3OB4Y9LU-ffJA4c&t=1548

Oh jeeze, you have no idea. You can watch it yourself: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?si=b3OB4Y9LU-ffJA4c&t=1548

That timestamp is about where the audience member (a maintainer of ext4 and related utilities) starts speaking. The "here's the thing" quote is around 28:40.

First and foremost _____ is a giant hack to mitigate legacy mistakes.

Wow, every article on web technology should start this way. And lots of non-web technologies, too.

Rust is extremely geared toward maintainability at the cost of other values such as learnability and iteration speed. Whether it's successful is of course somewhat a matter of opinion (at least until we figure out how to do good quantitative studies on software maintainability), and it is of course possible to write brittle Rust code. But it does make a lot of common errors (including ones Go facilitates) hard or impossible to replicate.

It also strongly pushes toward specific types of abstractions and architectural decisions, which is pretty unique among mainstream languages, and is of course a large part of what critics dislike about it (since that's extremely limiting compared to the freedom most languages give you). But the ability for the compiler to influence the high-level design and code organization is a large part of what makes Rust uniquely maintainability-focused, at least in theory.

And in fact it's not specific to Rust, and Rust is the first language with a fix available. (Thanks to some other comments for pointing this out.) Java has apparently declared it "won't fix."

https://flatt.tech/research/posts/batbadbut-you-cant-securely-execute-commands-on-windows/#appendix-b-status-of-the-affected-programming-languages

That's true in C as well, though. This is what people mean when they say things like "undefined behavior can result in time travel".

The difference is twofold:

• Rust's rules for valid unsafe code are not completely formalized yet. This means that there are open questions about whether particularly complex patterns in unsafe code will be guaranteed by future versions of the compiler to be sound. Conversely, the C and C++ spec are generally sufficient to determine whether any particular piece of code has undefined behavior, even if actually analyzing it to find out is not possible automatically using existing static analysis tools.
• Because safe Rust is so strict about what it permits, the compiler is able to make more aggressive optimizations; in theory, this could indeed cause undefined behavior to be "worse" at runtime than a comparable situation in a globally-unsafe language. I'm unaware of any actual examples of that phenomenon, though.

I know several world class programmers, and interestingly, the commonality among them is that they all seem to use Vim as their code editor. Many people I know who think of themselves as world class programmers use Emacs.

What a burn!