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You can write less garbage in some languages (eg no memory safety bugs in safe Rust), or at least make it more difficult to write that garbage

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Some people don’t understand that reducing bugs and eliminating entire classes of bugs is progress. Their “gotcha” is that it’s still possible to write logic bugs, and therefore what’s the point of any language improvements?

You can still write memory safety bugs, you just need unsafe. I'm glad unsafe is used in so many libraries.

Libraries are where unsafe belongs. Having unsafe be an explicit feature is immeasurably better compared to every line in the entire program potentially being unsafe.

Opting out of safety is fine, but safety must be opt-out to be effective, not opt-in. A standard, enforced way to tell readers where the dragons lie is super helpful.

Right, note that I said safe Rust, which is the vast vast majority of Rust out there. This is a major improvement over, say, C, where any line of code could be potentially unsafe.

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