I agree that in my experience, little unsafe is needed. However, (from an earlier article in this series):
This project is a library that exposes a C API but the implementation is C++, and it vendors C libraries (e.g. mbedtls) which we build from source. The final artifacts are a `libfoo.a` static library and a `libfoo.h` C header.
In this case, this project is doing a lot of FFI, both exposing C, as well as calling into C libraries. That's unsafe. Which is a good example of a project that may use unsafe more than the average Rust project.
My feeling was that this rewrite is not actually "done". Sure, all their C++ has been converted to Rust, but it seems like there's a lot of unsafe that they could rewrite in safe Rust.
And for the C libraries they vendor in, assuming none of them are exposed directly in their public API, it's likely they can replace them with Rust libraries with equivalent behavior. mbedtls seems like a good example of that; certainly it wouldn't be a small effort to switch to rustls, but it might be worth it to do so. And even if they didn't choose to do that, I just did a quick search on crates.io, and it looks like there are safe wrappers for mbedtls.
Comments
I agree that in my experience, little unsafe is needed. However, (from an earlier article in this series):
In this case, this project is doing a lot of FFI, both exposing C, as well as calling into C libraries. That's unsafe. Which is a good example of a project that may use unsafe more than the average Rust project.
My feeling was that this rewrite is not actually "done". Sure, all their C++ has been converted to Rust, but it seems like there's a lot of unsafe that they could rewrite in safe Rust.
And for the C libraries they vendor in, assuming none of them are exposed directly in their public API, it's likely they can replace them with Rust libraries with equivalent behavior. mbedtls seems like a good example of that; certainly it wouldn't be a small effort to switch to rustls, but it might be worth it to do so. And even if they didn't choose to do that, I just did a quick search on crates.io, and it looks like there are safe wrappers for mbedtls.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.