Simpler stuff like debug C heap, and checked iterators in C++ standard library, catch 95% of memory corruption issues in C++. These are enabled by default in debug builds, very often just pressing F5 in visual studio finds the buggy line of code in a matter of seconds.
Valgrind is Linux-only, I don’t have it. One Windows equivalent is memory profiler under Debug / Performance Profiler / Memory Usage in visual studio, Rust is not supported by visual studio. A cross-platform equivalent is Intel VTune Profiler, no support for Rust either.
I mean, if you’re talking about checked iterators... that’s checked in Rust too.
I am 100% Windows, but don’t triage these issues often enough to suggest tools; the unsafe code I write tends to be small and pretty obvious. (More like “write to this register” than “here’s a complex data structure.”)
In safe Rust. Safe C# is the same, it doesn’t even have raw pointers in the language unless compiling with /unsafe, and writing code in unsafe blocks.
> More like “write to this register” than “here’s a complex data structure.”
I sometimes write C++ DLLs precisely to implement these complex data structures. Modern CPUs have progressively worse proportion of RAM latency / compute speed. This means you need full control over memory layout of data on the performance critical paths of code, or it will be slow.
They’re checked in unsafe too. You only skip those checks if you use a specific “do this index with no checks” function. Unsafe does not change the semantics of code, only gives you more options.
Yes, and many people write that kind of code in Rust too, and use tools to help them debug it. I’m just saying that it’s not an issue for the kinds of code I write, so I can’t personally recommend tooling. I know "use GDB" isn't a great response to a Windows user, even if it is what I end up personally doing.
(It's true that I can't get the performance tools working though, but given I've used VS for all of 20 minutes... I'm also very interested to see if support happens native-ly, given how much interest there is for Rust inside of Microsoft right now.)
However you put it, tooling support is way, way better for C and C++ for obvious reasons.
Other critical bits for commercial development in many industries (certs, standards, third-party support, official bindings...) are also completely lacking.
That is not something against Rust, it is just what happens until things get popular enough.
