mod name_of_module {
// code goes here
}
This leads to a really nice gentle onboarding flow where inexperienced users can start out contributing to the safe parts of the project, and (optionally) move on to gnarly unsafe bits later when they are already familiar with the project's codebase. It also dramatically reduces review workload for maintainers as they can rely on the compiler enforcing invariants outside of unsafe modules.
This works less well for really low-level code like embedded code or kernel code. But it's still a lot better than nothing.
Maybe there's a reason why game developers have primarily used scripting languages - give out a safe managed GC-backed runtime for the majority of developers, and let only a select few who understand the system to develop the core C++ engine. Maybe Safe Rust can be used this way (as a "fast" scripting language), to separate between these two worlds... but the problems is even Safe Rust is just really difficult to grok for newcomers, and the hoops they go through to circumvent the borrow checker either falls into using Copy/Clone all over the place (slow) or smart pointers (slow) or array indices with bound checking (maybe less slow but more cumbersome, and also prone to logical invalidation errors if you're not careful)
Are smart pointers like Box, Rc and even Arc any slower than any scripting system you'd "hand out" to most developers from your tightly written C++ core engine?
One thing that I see is that 90% of code is simple enough that you don't need to have any ceremony around ownership beyond writing a & in front of a value or type, 5% is harder than that but doable, and 5% requires extensive expertise to avoid allocations, or using Arc. I'd wager that the distribution of code that a GC can optimize during runtime is comparable, if not worse, at higher memory consumption.
I've compared some simple networked applications written in Java and Rust for that purpose, and performance ended up being comparable, but with 100x memory consumption, even when using GraalVM.
Yup I know that the borrow checker does also work inside unsafe blocks. But when what you primarily do as a systems programmer is establishing invariants in your systems so that you can exploit (or circumvent) the UB-ness of the underlying system (OS/driver/hardware/etc.), and when the borrow checker doesn't really help you with verifying these invariants... The Rustonomicon states that whenever you open up an unsafe block, it doesn't pollute only the scope, but the whole module (https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/working-with-unsafe.html). So there can be a correctness issue outside the unsafe block because it disobeys the invariants implicitly set up by the developer inside the unsafe block. And you can't do anything about this other than carefully reasoning about all the various ways your implicit invariants can break inside the whole module. So unsafe is ultimately more of a convention (or a promise) that you have designed and verified your invariants correctly, so that you will not produce undefined behavior no matter how you use the module as an outside user. If you want to verify your invariants any further than that, you need to check UB at runtime using the Miri interpreter (which is really slow and still incomplete), or just use Ada SPARK.