The inconceivable types of Rust: How to make self-borrows safe (2024)

I've considered rust for some performance-critical greenfield work where I would normally use C. Rust's syntax, idioms, and packaging are foreign to my team, so the only motivation to take that on is the safety of the borrow checker.

But as I investigate Rust, I learn of trivial use cases that cannot be safely represented [0] in Rust's syntax. TFA demonstrates even more provably-safe techniques that are impossible to express safely in Rust. So after all the difficulty of learning Rust, I might still have to choose between performance and safety?

My impression is that Rust 1.91.0 simply isn't a suitable C replacement for many real world use cases. But since it's already being used in production, I worry that backwards compatibility concerns will prevent these issues from being fixed properly, or at all.

Perhaps rust2 will get this right. Until then there's C.

[0]: https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-han...