In addition, you can't overflow a buffer nor unintentionally read outside the bounds of an array, that will cause a runtime panic and abort the program.
Doing this in C or C++ is possible, but the fact that even the best of the best programmers in these languages sometimes still make these mistakes shows the limitations of the paradigm.
Even the most novice Rust programmer who stays in the guardrails will produce programs free of these sorts of memory safety bugs. The same cannot be said about C or C++ programs.
Aren't most of these issues caught in C++ code by static code analysis tools, and even just flipping switches on C++ compilers? I mean, check out tools like cppcheck and address sanitizer. They exist for ages.
Your blend of comments makes it sound like no one knew or cared about these issues other than Rust fanboys.
(What's more, Rust is substantially nicer to use than C++. The language, package manager, and compiler are all so much more straightforward than C++ that I would use it for that alone)
I think this part answers your question. A novice could produce reasonably safe Rust code by just reading a book. I’ve no experience with either language and I can safely say I’d have no idea which switches to “just flip” in the compiler and what tools I should look up to write safe C++ code.
I do know that “Learn Language X” books do not include this information so as to not overwhelm the novice.
That blend of comments is at best grasping at straws. How long do you think a developer stays a "novice"? Does Rust have any problem that prevents developers from learning and improving their skills as fast as any other developers do? Are all Rust projects maintained by novice and junior devs where no one at all can claim to have any senior level skills?
If that's the best argument, that's not an argument at all.
Look, I’m not the one making these arguments, I’m just pointing out that all your objections seem to have been answered already. If you have a counter argument that shows Rust, as practiced, is no safer than C++, then I’d like to see it.
That is a strange takeaway from my post. Of course people care, but the difference is that one language and its toolchain was designed and built specifically to avoid these bugs and one wasn't.
I have been writing C++ professionally since around 2000-2001, and have been working with Rust for about 18 months. For single threaded code, the code I write in both is about equivalent in terms of robustness and stability, but for anything multithreaded, I trust my Rust code's correctness substantially more, even with all the checkers and sanitizers enabled on my C++ codebase.
Would I choose Rust for everything? Hell no, for evolutionary and fast moving code bases like in games, C++ is plenty good enough.
For anything systems related that requires parallelism and robustness, I will 100% stick with Rust.
What definition of "doesn't" do you adhere to? Because there are use-after-free CVEs from Rust code.
https://github.com/Forestryks/process-sync-rs/issues/3
One could say "Rust doesn't stop you from calling out into unsafe C code, so it's still possible to produce memory vulnerabilities in Rust", and it would be true, but it kind of misses the point and only really bolsters the Rust people when they say they want to rewrite everything in Rust.
In Rust, an API with a rule such as "you must check that the mutex is unlocked before you can destroy it" would be implemented using the type system in such a way as to make it impossible to drop it without checking its state. This is something that is not possible to do in C and cumbersome to do in C++.
Feel free to pick an example that tickles your fancy.
But another is that the kind of things even reported is different. There's a case a while back where C++ and Rust have identical APIs which make an identical promise. The obvious way to implement that API on popular platforms introduces a TOCTOU race, and so that race was present in Rust's stdlib and in all three popular C++ standard library implementations. Rust reported the TOCTOU race and its fix, there's a CVE number. The three C++ libraries just decided it's a QOI issue and silently made equivalent changes over the next few months or years.
In C++ the argument goes like this: C++ says that if any other programs are running on your computer, all filesystem access is Undefined Behaviour. Simply do not run more than one program per computer, then there's no TOCTOU race, no bug. Rust says duh, obviously multi-processing has been a thing since the 1960s so we have to assume other programs may be running, the TOCTOU race is a bug and must be fixed.