Why Rust and Its Memory Safety Lulls Developers Into a False Sense of Security, Leading to More Serious Bugs · The Angry Dev
Darren Horrocks explains various Programming and DevOps practices, with some guides, explanations and ramblings from a sometimes angry man
Rust has garnered significant attention in the programming world for its focus on memory safety without the need for a garbage collector, making it an appealing option for systems programming, where safety and performance are both critical. By preventing entire categories of bugs like data races, buffer overflows, and null pointer dereferencing at compile time, Rust has earned a reputation as a “safe” language. However, this very focus on memory safety can lull developers into a false sense of security, leading them to overlook other kinds of programming errors, potentially causing even more serious bugs. Here’s why.
Rust’s strong emphasis on memory safety creates a psychological effect on developers, often leading them to assume that because the compiler ensures memory is safely managed, other aspects of their code are automatically more secure or reliable. This “halo effect” can lead developers to lower their guard when it comes to other critical aspects of software engineering, such as concurrency, logic errors, or mismanaging external resources like file systems and databases.
