Pitfalls of Safe Rust

Title is slightly misleading but the content is good. It's the "Safe Rust" in the title that's weird to me. These apply to Rust altogether, you don't avoid them by writing unsafe Rust code. They also aren't unique to Rust.

A less baity title might be "Rust pitfalls: Runtime correctness beyond memory safety."

It is consistent with the way the Rust community uses "safe": as "passes static checks and thus protects from many runtime errors."

This regularly drives C++ programmers mad: the statement "C++ is all unsafe" is taken as some kind of hyperbole, attack or dogma, while the intent may well be to factually point out the lack of statically checked guarantees.

It is subtle but not inconsistent that strong static checks ("safe Rust") may still leave the possibility of runtime errors. So there is a legitimate, useful broader notion of "safety" where Rust's static checking is not enough. That's a bit hard to express in a title - "correctness" is not bad, but maybe a bit too strong.

No, the Rust community almost universally understands "safe" as referring to memory safety, as per Rust's documentation, and especially the unsafe book, aka Rustonomicon [1]. In that regard, Safe Rust is safe, Unsafe Rust is unsafe, and C++ is also unsafe. I don't think anyone is saying "C++ is all unsafe."

You might be talking about "correct", and that's true, Rust generally favors correctness more than most other languages (e.g. Rust being obstinate about turning a byte array into a file path, because not all file paths are made of byte arrays, or e.g. the myriad string types to denote their semantics).

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/meet-safe-and-unsafe.html

If a C++ developer decides to use purely containers and smart pointers when starting a new project, how are they going to develop unsafe code?

Containers like std::vector and smart pointers like std::unique_ptr seem to offer all of the same statically checked guarantees that Rust does.

I just do not see how Rust is a superior language compared to modern C++

The commonly given response to this question is two-fold, and both parts have a similar root cause: smart pointers and "safety" being bolted-on features developed decades after the fact. The first part is the standard library itself. You can put your data in a vec for instance, but if you want to iterate, the standard library gives you back a regular pointer that can be dereferenced unchecked, and is intended to be invalidated while still held in the event of a mutation. The second part is third party libraries. You may be diligent about managing memory with smart pointers, but odds are any library you might use probably wants a dumb pointer, and whether or not it assumes responsibility for freeing that pointer later is at best documented in natural language.

This results in an ecosystem where safety is opt-in, which means in practice most implementations are largely unsafe. Even if an individual developer wants to proactive about safety, the ecosystem isn't there to support them to the same extent as in rust. By contrast, safety is the defining feature of the rust ecosystem. You can write code and the language and ecosystem support you in doing so rather than being a barrier you have to fight back against.

The standard library doesn't give you a regular pointer, though (unless you specifically ask for that). It gives you an iterator, which is pointer-like, but exists precisely so that other behaviors can be layered. There's no reason why such an iterator can't do bounds checking etc, and, indeed, in most C++ implementations around, iterators do make such checks in debug builds.

The problem, rather, is that there's no implementation of checked iterators that's fast enough for release build. That's largely a culture issue in C++ land; it could totally be done.