Pitfalls of Safe Rust

When people say Rust is a “safe language”, they often mean memory safety. And while memory safety is a great start, it’s far from all it takes to build robust applications. Memory safety is important but not sufficient for overall reliability. In this article, I want to show you a few common gotchas in safe Rust that the compiler doesn’t detect and how to avoid them. Even in safe Rust code, you still need to handle various risks and edge cases. You need to address aspects like input validation and making sure that your business logic is correct. Here are just a few categories of bugs that Rust doesn’t protect you from: Type casting mistakes (e.g. overflows) Logic bugs Panics because of using unwrap or expect or Malicious or incorrect build.rs scripts in third-party crates scripts in third-party crates Incorrect unsafe code in third-party libraries Race conditions Let’s look at ways to avoid some of the more common problems. The tips are roughly ordered by how likely you are ... Read full article.