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Why Safety Profiles Failed
As for dangling pointers and for ownership, this model detects all possible errors. This means that we can guarantee that a program is free of uses of invalidated pointers.
It may permit pointer operations in a definition, but it doesn’t address the other side of the call: without a safe-specifier, how does the Profiles design deal with functions like sort that are inherently unsafe? Additionally, it has simpler, safe versions of facilities which are unsafe in C++: the Rust iterator, for example, keeps both the data pointer and length in the same struct to completely alleviate the aliasing concerns that prevent safety analysis in C++. The latest Android security study “prioritizes transitioning to memory-safe languages.”[ android-security] The off-ramp from C++ is an increasingly viable and attractive strategy for projects looking to reduce CVE exposure.
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