Microsoft: Rust Is the Industry’s ‘Best Chance’ at Safe Systems Programming
When people talk about Rust&#x27;s advantage in safety, is it just the compile-time checks about Ownership? Could not the C compiler be given the same thing, with a flag like &quot;strict mode&quot;?<p>Sorry if my question is really stupid. My experience has been with scripting languages, not systems programming. But I read the chapter in the Rust Book about Ownership, and I think I get it. In a sense, is not the compiler simply inserting function calls to free() in the right places (and warning you if it can&#x27;t)? Couldn&#x27;t this be added to the C compiler? In fact I&#x27;m not sure what the difference is from a linter.<p>The article has the phrase &quot;C&#x2F;C++ Can’t Be Fixed&quot;, so it anticipates my question. But its answer is that programmers either won&#x27;t remember or won&#x27;t bother to set their C to &quot;strict mode&quot;, run the linter, or whatever, because &quot;static analysis comes with too much overhead: It needs to be wired into the build system. . . . If it’s not on by default it won’t it won&#x27;t help.&quot; But if this is the only argument, it seems weak. I agree that it is more effort, but isn&#x27;t it much more effort to switch out your entire language and ecosystem?