> But it's not completely obvious to me that you're correct.
:-)
Which is to say, I don't know you're wrong. But it's a pretty subtle thing that requires a careful survey. And likely discussion of lots of concrete examples. It's far more nuanced than the thing I was responding to originally (not to you), which was this wrong-headed notion that Rust isn't memory safe "entirely." Because once you go down that path, the entire notion of "memory safety" starts to unravel. That is, of course Rust isn't "entirely" memory safe. Pretty much nothing practical actually is in the first place. I tried to force this issue by asking for counter-examples. The only good one I got was Javascript in browser, but that basically falls under the category of "programs in a strictly controlled sandbox" rather than "programming language" IMO.
I think this comment of mine might also be helpful, which reflects a bit on terms like "memory safety" and why they are a tricky but very common type of phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33825307
> Where Rust is (somewhat although not entirely) unique is bringing this compartmentalization into a context that (mostly) lacks a runtime and garbage collection
I just think that the model of “breaking down” is different between the two platforms and that might matter for some use cases.