> It's not performance (you often gain performance, especially in large programs). It's warmup and footprint.
To me, those are also performance characteristics. Maybe my view on what constitutes "performance" is broader than average here.
> When I do need that control, I find that Rust requires reaching for unsafe too frequently while still paying the full price for the safety of things I don't use (even Rust's memory management of strings doesn't give me the control I want; I have to work pretty hard for it).
Fair enough, I can't tell you that you don't have that experience when writing Rust. It's pretty different from mine though, and the experience of the large number of former C/C++ devs I've worked with after they learned Rust; the only people I've talked to with that experience didn't really try to learn Rust and went in hoping that it wouldn't work for them, which informs my perception here, but I recognize that individual experiences won't always fit into larger trends.
> Like I said, C also fits in the category, so it's not a meaningful distinction. The difference is in what you can do in the safe subset. Zig lets you do more things in a safe way than C (where the safe subset is effectively empty), Rust lets you do more safe things than Zig, and Java lets you do more safe things than Rust.
I don't think I understand what you're saying here. I don't know of a way to turn off undefined behavior by default in C and only opt into it in discrete segements of the code, but maybe I'm missing something.
> That's the very thing I'm arguing against. I'm saying that different languages eliminate different bugs at a cost (again, Zig eliminates many memory safety bugs you'd find in C or even C++, arguably the most dangerous ones). What I'm saying is that what you get and whether the price is worth it depends both on the program you're writing and on your personal preferences. Just to be clear, "preferences" doesn't mean I care more or less about correctness, but which approaches to correctness I find more or less effective, something on which there is no consensus.
It seems like you're arguing against the idea of memory safety as a category at all then. To me, "I can't write code that's memory unsafe without explicitly opting into it" seems like an objective statement, and it's objectively different than "I can't write certain types of memory safety bugs in a given language". I don't really understand what's useful about being able to write memory unsafe code without having to opt in when in practice the number of bugs from mistaken memory safety are overwhelmingly more common than the cases when you're forced to opt into unsafe because Rust forced you to work around the constraints, and even in low-level programs, the actual number of truly unsafe operations you need to do tend to be fairly low in my experience. I guess I can't say for certain that you don't truly need to do things that you're forced to write unsafe for too often, but to me, it seems like you're refusing to pay a pretty small price for mostly ideological purity rather than pragmatism.
> I think it also depends on the kinds of programs you write, because for many programs I write (and for which I pick Java) Rust's level of memory safety is too low
> [1]: For example, the fact that in Java, references are not required to be stable machine pointers opens the door to some powerful optimisations that are not available to languages where pointers are required to be machine pointers (or something close enough to them). Or the fact that low-level languages require that the machine instructions executed are those present in the compiled image (or close enough), or, if you want, caring about worst-case performance at the expense of average case performance (although both C++ and Rust specifically don't always make that easy) precludes some other very powerful optimisations.
I'm struggling to imagine what the circumstances are where these are genuine concerns rather than theoretical or premature optimizations. What are some examples of programs where you'd get better characteristics running them if they were written in Java rather than Rust due to the lack of enough "memory safety" in Rust?