In Defense of C++

> Just using Rust will not magically make your application safe; it will just make it a lot harder to have memory leaks or safety issues.

You know, not sure I even agree with the memory leaks part. If you define a memory leak very narrowly as forgetting to free a pointer, this is correct. But in my experience working with many languages including C/C++, forgotten pointers are almost never the problem. You're gonna be dealing with issues involving "peaky" memory usage e.g. erroneously persistent references to objects or bursty memory allocation patterns. And these occur in all languages.

C++'s design encourages that kind of allocation "leak" though. The article suggests using smart pointers, so let's take an example from there and mix make_shared with weak_ptr. Congrats, you've now extended the lifetime of the allocation to whatever the lifetime of your weak pointer is.

Rc::Weak does the same thing in Rust, but I rarely see anyone use it.

Huh? What do you mean? The point of std::weak_ptr is that it's non-owning, so it has no effect on the lifetime of the pointed object.