As an analogy, you can write safe code in assembler as well if you and your team are incredibly disciplined and only interact with libraries written with a similar amount of discipline. The appeal of alternatives is you can write safe code with a fraction of the discipline and mental effort required.

There is no extra “discipline“ or “mental effort” required to write safe C++. Don’t use new/delete/free/malloc and don’t use operator&. Of course, you can say that we might as well remove them from the language entirely, but I really don’t think it takes extra effort not to use them.

There are countless ways of causing undefined behaviour in C++ (not including memory management mistakes) as well as platform specific behaviour that you don't see in other languages. It's a very complex language to master compared to alternatives.

See eg http://blog.regehr.org/archives/140

C++14:

  auto p = std::make_unique<int>(5);
  auto q = std::move(p);
  std::cout << *p << std::endl;

Segfault using the “safe” C++ features. I'm a fan of modern C++, but it's not safe (in a Rust sense) even if you stick to C++11/C++14 features.

For comparison, the same thing in Rust:

  fn main() {
      let p = Box::new(5);
      let q = p;
      println!("{}", p);
  }

gives, upon compiling:

    error: use of moved value: `p` [E0382]
    println!("{}", p);
                   ^
    note: in this expansion of format_args!
    note: in this expansion of print! (defined in <std macros>)
    note: in this expansion of println! (defined in <std macros>)
    help: run `rustc --explain E0382` to see a detailed explanation
    note: `p` moved here because it has type `Box<i32>`, which is moved
    by default
    let q = p;
        ^
    help: if you would like to borrow the value instead, use a `ref`
    binding as shown:
    let ref q = p;
    error: aborting due to previous error

Running `rustc --explain E0382` or going to https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/error-index.html#E0382 gives you an extended error message as well.