rust-san

ated for its goal of memory safety. It's easy to say that, but it's a lot harder to list specific features that Rust has that shouldn't be there. In fact, as far as I'm concerned Rust is an exercise in minimal language design, as the development of Rust from 0.6-1.0 makes clear (features were being thrown out left and right). Most of the features that look like they're there solely to support "zero-cost abstractions"—traits, for example—are really needed to achieve memory safety too. For instance, Deref is central to the concept of smart pointers, and, without smart pointers, users would have to manually write Arc/Rc/Box in unsafe code every time they wanted to heap-allocate something. > Language simplicity goes a long way, even as far as sound formal verification is concerned. For example, there are existing sound static analysis tools that can guarantee no UB for C -- but not the complete C++, AFAIK -- with relatively little effort. It's not yet clear to me whether Zig, with its comptime, is simple enough for that, though. The most important static analyzers used in industry today are Clang's sanitizers, which work on both C and C++. The most important such sanitizers actually work at the LLVM level, which means they work on Rust as well [1]! The days of having to write a compiler frontend for static analysis are long gone. We have excellent shared compiler infrastructure that makes it easy to write instrumentation that targets many low-level languages at once. (Even in the world of C, this is necessary. Plain old C99 is an increasingly marginal language, because the real important code, such as Windows and Linux kernels, are written in compiler-specific dialects of C, which means that a static analysis tool that isn't integrated with some popular compiler infrastructure will have limited usefulness anyway.) > It is my great interest in software correctness, together with my personal aesthetic preferences, that has made me dislike language complexity so much and made me a believer in "when in doubt -- leave it out." Again: easy to say, harder to specify specific Rust features you think should be removed. [1]: https://github.com/japaric/rust-san