What Rust does is reduce the amount of code that's memory unsafe, that needs to be triply reviewed and audited. Reduction of the scope of high-scrutiny code is the single most leveraged thing that can be done to improve code quality in a large, long-running project. Why? Because it lets you do careful, time-consuming analysis on a small part of your codebase (the bits that are marked unsafe), then scale the analysis up to the rest of your code.

> These stories are mutually inconsistent. Either you have memory safety or you don't.

This is... what can I say. This is simply incorrect. It pains me to say this as a fan of your games but you really don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.

No, that's not how this works. You write the unsafe code in one place and make sure it's correct (just like you'd do in C or Jai), and then you wrap it in a function signature that lets the compiler apply its memory safety checks to all the places that call it (this is what Rust gives you over C).

This is still a meaningful improvement to memory safety over C. The compiler checks the majority of your program; if you still see memory bugs now you only have a small subset to think about when debugging them.

This is also not very different from a hypothetical language with your "actual" memory safety- in that case, you still have to consider the correctness of the compiler checks themselves. Rust just takes a more balanced and flexible approach here and moves some of that stuff out of the compiler. (In fact this simplifies the compiler, which increases confidence in its correctness...)

Rust has been very clear about all this from the beginning. If you are still reading people's claims about Rust memory safety a different way, that's on you.

> Why wouldn't I use a lower-friction language with a faster compiler?

That's totally up to you! I don't have a problem with people using other languages for these kinds of reasons. My goal here is not to convert you, but to cover more accurately what Rust is and isn't capable of. (At the root of this thread, that's things like "writing fast software with effective memory management styles.")