In your blind love for Rust you seem to forget that it in fact operates with pointers - everywhere.
The thing is that Rust either tracks the lifetime of a naked pointer (similiar to std::unique_ptr), or you wrap pointers in objects which facilitate reference counting to track the lifetime (similiar to std::shared_ptr).
In the end both kinds operate on generic, unsafe raw pointers - safe only thanks to ownership tracking and "boxing".
The only difference here is that Rust thankfully made it opt-out while C++ unfortunately needs to use opt-in.
But yeah... I'm eager to hear your explaination how Rust doesn't use those stupid pointers. Maybe you can create a new computer architecture too? I mean since x86 uses pointers and stuff. Maybe we should use garbage collected languages for that, huh?
In the end everything is "unsafe" assembler. "It's all unsafe if we penetrate the abstractions!" is basically "Everybody's naked under their clothes!" Yes, true, but profoundly irrelevant.
Safety is added by the higher layers. If Rust has pointers that are ownership tracked, then it is incorrect to think of them as raw pointers; they are safer than that. Safety is attained by creating compilers/runtimes/interpreters that can not be convinced to execute certain patterns of assembler code, or perhaps require rather explicit labeling.
> In your blind love for Rust you seem to forget that it in fact operates with pointers - everywhere.
I don't use Rust at all :-) I favor Nim, Haskell and Lisp. I am just pointing to Rust as a better alternative to cc14.
> I'm eager to hear your explaination how Rust doesn't use those stupid pointers.
Only in embedded systems where direct hardware access, memory and performance are issues pointers makes sense. In all other cases pointers are bad programming style.
The thing is that Rust either tracks the lifetime of a naked pointer (similiar to std::unique_ptr), or you wrap pointers in objects which facilitate reference counting to track the lifetime (similiar to std::shared_ptr).
In the end both kinds operate on generic, unsafe raw pointers - safe only thanks to ownership tracking and "boxing".
The only difference here is that Rust thankfully made it opt-out while C++ unfortunately needs to use opt-in.
But yeah... I'm eager to hear your explaination how Rust doesn't use those stupid pointers. Maybe you can create a new computer architecture too? I mean since x86 uses pointers and stuff. Maybe we should use garbage collected languages for that, huh?