> Your laser focus on one particular type of bug blinds you to the fact that complex systems lead to bugs in general.
Therefore it is clearly in your interest to use languages that remove various classes of bugs. No language claims to be able to prevent bugs. But if your compiler can prevent you from making silly mistakes, that's a win.
> I'm saying I see Rust falling down the same "cool new ideas" rabbit hole as C++, and Haskell, and Erlang, and Common Lisp, and... Of those languages only one has achieved any notable success.
What bizarre argument that is. Haskell is a research language, what else could it be but be about "cool new ideas"? And it does effectively remove different classes of bugs, though like most functional languages, it's a managed language, and thus not terribly suitable for low-level programming. Erlang was designed to solve a certain class of problems, and it clearly solves these issues better than C++. Not everything and everybody needs to solve low-level issues or use inline assembly.
Rust can use unsafe code (guarded by unsafe blocks), but this code has to expose a sane interface. So you can do pointer trickery that is otherwise impossible, but instead of having an entirely unsafe program, locations with dangerous code are clearly outlined.
Therefore it is clearly in your interest to use languages that remove various classes of bugs. No language claims to be able to prevent bugs. But if your compiler can prevent you from making silly mistakes, that's a win.
> I'm saying I see Rust falling down the same "cool new ideas" rabbit hole as C++, and Haskell, and Erlang, and Common Lisp, and... Of those languages only one has achieved any notable success.
What bizarre argument that is. Haskell is a research language, what else could it be but be about "cool new ideas"? And it does effectively remove different classes of bugs, though like most functional languages, it's a managed language, and thus not terribly suitable for low-level programming. Erlang was designed to solve a certain class of problems, and it clearly solves these issues better than C++. Not everything and everybody needs to solve low-level issues or use inline assembly.
Rust can use unsafe code (guarded by unsafe blocks), but this code has to expose a sane interface. So you can do pointer trickery that is otherwise impossible, but instead of having an entirely unsafe program, locations with dangerous code are clearly outlined.