It does provide a pile of helpful constructs (references, slices, generics, privacy), which, if they don't work 100%, are still brilliant building blocks for creating abstractions that expose safe interfaces, allowing the areas where "program as expected" is required to be concentrated into controlled areas/libraries. (And, all those features still work in the unsafe code, helping the programmer get it correct.)
It works really well in practice, even if it isn't bulletproof... there's nothing to stop a programmer typing 'unsafe' to side-step the safe interfaces in random places, but one quickly learns this is usually just heaping unnecessary debugger work on oneself, to track down little mistakes that the compiler would normally point to directly.
It works really well in practice, even if it isn't bulletproof... there's nothing to stop a programmer typing 'unsafe' to side-step the safe interfaces in random places, but one quickly learns this is usually just heaping unnecessary debugger work on oneself, to track down little mistakes that the compiler would normally point to directly.