D - Unsafe and doomed

[Jesse Phillips]

On Saturday, 4 January 2014 at 02:09:51 UTC, NoUseForAName wrote:
> This piece (recently seen on the Hacker News front page):
>
> http://rust-class.org/pages/using-rust-for-an-undergraduate-os-course.html
>
> .. includes a pretty damning assessment of D as "unsafe" 
> (compared to Rust) and generally doomed. I remember hearing 
> Walter Bright talking a lot about "safe code" during a D 
> presentation. Was that about a different kind of safety? Is the 
> author just wrong? Basically I want to hear the counterargument 
> (if there is one).

I'd say Kelet has it right, and I don't think the author has it 
wrong either. He goes into the specific issue he has in the 
section about Rust:

"Go and D provide memory safety but with all objects being 
automatically managed with a garbage collector (over which 
languages users have little control). Rust provides a way for 
programmers to declare objects that are automatically managed or 
explicitly managed, and statically checks that explicitly managed 
objects are used safely."

Basically D provides safety, but it also provides means to do 
unsafe things. I'm not familiar with Rust, but I wouldn't be 
surprised if unsafe actions could also be taken.