In this particular case Rust could have helped, because the table construction can use a normal Rust while the tight decoder loop can remain `unsafe` which can be justified more easily. But I demand more than the human-readable justification.
What Rust brings to the table is static enforcement of its ownership rules, that's it.
How does Rust deal with buffer overflows? Bounds checking. What an innovative solution, congratulations to the Rust people for this groundbreaking innovation. And they keep acting like they've fucking discovered hot water.
Rust is novel because it bundles lots of existing ideas into one usable package. Even the borrow checking is not new, it's adapted and improved from research languages like Cyclone.
No one is saying that bounds checking is novel. It's really C and C++ that are novel, in that they are the only languages where bounds checking is not the default.
But if you're having the "memory safe replacement for C/C++" conversation it shouldn't surprise you that people bring up Rust.
Agreed, the interesting part isn't that hot water exists, it's that given the widespread existence of hot water so many people still insist on exclusively showering with cold water.
I'm not even saying that bounds checking should be used everywhere, just that it really does seem like unsafe shouldn't be the default for so many projects.
Time to repost my favorite C.A.R Hoare quote from 1980, as C was gaining traction.
"Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished
us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions
would have long been against the law."
Showering with cold water is obviously safer (no chance of accidentally scalding yourself). But most people prefer showering with hot water because it's the way they've always done it, they're more comfortable with it, and while they could get burned by it, they view the risk of significant damage to be relatively low (if you discover the water is too hot, fix it quickly and you'll probably be fine).
