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Comment by pulse7 | Hacker News Reader

It's certainly better with such safety annotations than without...

It’s not clear to me that it necessarily is, if those annotations provide a false feeling of security. C-rusted doesn’t seem to have a real story for preserving invariants in linked-in but not locally compiled code, which is the main thing that makes C a valuable ecosystem.

To be fair, Rust does not really have such a story either. Externally compiled code (i.e. code not built with the exact same version of the compiler) must interact via the unsafe C ABI and be re-wrapped locally into safe Rust-friendly constructs. There are crates to make this a bit easier, though.

Things might be different if you could preserve useful invariants all the way down to binary code, of course. Then externally compiled code could also be meaningfully checked for safety.

The difference is culture and tooling: linking against random .so files is normal in the C world, while Rust strongly encourages you to use source dependencies.

For the time being, as Apple showed by their gigantic effort with Swift ABI, there are C and C++ shops (and Objective-C ones) that really care about dynamic libraries, which any alternative needs to take into account for their adoption.

The main issue is the culture, being more in line with ALGOL/PL/Ada/Wirth languages point of view of why security matters, even if there is a bit of unsafe core around.

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