The meme refers to the old adage "C lets you shoot yourself on the foot. C++ lets you shoot both feet and gives you a shotgun to do it" - referring to the how C allows you to perform memory-unsafe operations (causing corruption, or worse, security vulnerabilities), and C++'s complexity, potentially obscuring such unsafetyness.

Rust's memory safety tries to save you from doing (un)intentional bad stuff, by giving you compile-time errors. It's also the bane of everyone so used to C/++'s ability to just pass around and modify whatever memory they want.

[–] dukk@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

I’ve actually never heard that one before. I was specifically referencing this quote by the language’s creator, but I guess that one works too.

[–] o11c@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What you are missing, of course, is the Rc<Refcell<T>> that you have to stick everywhere to make a nontrivial Rust program. It's like monads in Haskell, parentheses in lisp, verbosity in Java, or warnings in C - they're the magic words you have to incant correctly to make things work in their weird paradigms.

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