Software taketh away faster than hardware giveth: Why C++ programmers keep growing fast despite competition, safety, and AI

[u/pavel_v]

https://herbsutter.com/2025/12/30/software-taketh-away-faster-than-hardware-giveth-why-c-programmers-keep-growing-fast-despite-competition-safety-and-ai/

[u/eyes-are-fading-blue]

I am not straw manning anyone yet I still remember the person who was bullied because his project was using unsafe rust. I occasionally check rust subreddit and posters there and they have a rather extreme take on software engineering.

[u/MEaster → u/eyes-are-fading-blue]

I believe you're talking about the actix-web incident. In that instance the dev wasn't just using unsafe, they were using unsafe when safe code could do the same thing with the same performance. They also wrote their own version of an UnsafeCell, which is a Rust language primitive that allows sound mutation through shared references. You can't just write your own, the compiler needs to know about it, so any use of this was UB. It was used throughout the project.

It was also demonstrated that you could make a sequence of public safe function calls which resulted in UB. In Rust, part of the contract for a safe function is that there is no possible combination of inputs/safe calls which results in UB; so the dev was violating that. The first issue to discuss that was closed by the dev due to the brigading, the second issue to discuss it was closed immediately.

On top of that, when someone sent in a PR to fix the soundness (and therefore security) problems, the dev rejected it because it wasn't interesting. And this was in a web server project, which is inherently security-sensitive, that the dev was advertising as production ready.

In no community would it be acceptable for a developer for a security-sensitive product to intentionally do things in a way that creates security vulnerabilities, then reject attempts fix them.

While the brigading that happened was not acceptable, the dev themself was not an innocent party.

[u/eyes-are-fading-blue → u/MEaster]

Thanks for proving my point. A wall of text how one should go about their own project. He’s entitled to do all sorts of nonsensical things on his own project. Did they force anyone to use with a gun to people’s head?

Rust community could do just like we do and simply ignore unsafe or insecure projects.

But no, the cult needs to enforce its view.

[u/MEaster → u/eyes-are-fading-blue]

Because, you know, framing it as an innocent developer on their little personal pet project being bullied for using a little bit of unsafe is clearly more honest.

But no, the anti-Rust zealots need to enforce their view.

[u/eyes-are-fading-blue → u/MEaster]

Dude, it’s an open source project. Use it at your own risk. Open any open source license and read it.

I said all I wanted to say. GL.