Pitfalls of Safe Rust

Is "as" an uneccesary footgun?

That was my first impression as well. So much of Rust’s language and standard library enforces correctness, that gaps start to feel way more visible.

“as” is a good example. Floats are pretty much the only reason PartialEq exists, so why can’t we have a guaranteed-not-NaN-nor-inf type in std and use that everywhere? Why not make wrapping integers a panic even in release mode? Why not have proper dependent types (e.g. to remove bound checks), and proper linear types (to enforce that object destructors always run)?

It’s easy to forget that Rust is not an ideal language, but rather a very pragmatic one, and sometimes correctness loses in favour of some other goals.

The other option would be to change how floating point works. IEEE specifies operations, not names, so it would be totally valid to have <= on floats be a total order (using integer cpu instructions), and make a function called IEEEAreIdiotsWhoThinkThisIsFloatingPointLessThan which is the partial order that sucks.