There is a lot of fanboying in discussions like these, so I understand if you’re weary of that. That said I don’t think static analysis tools are a very good point of comparison for (what I’m assuming that you’re referring to) Rusts ownership system.
While static analysis tools certainly can be useful for some classes of errors, there are types of errors that they can’t catch that the borrowchecker can. This is because the language are built around them in Rust. Rusts lifetime analysis is dependent on the user adding lifetime annotations in certain situations, so since c++ doesn’t have these annotations static analysis tools for c++ can’t benefit from the information these annotations provide.
Furthermore, c++ suffers from being an old language with a lot of features. Legacy features can allow for various loopholes that are hard for a static analysis tool to reason about.
C++ static analysis tools can find errors, but Rusts borrowchecker can prove the absence of errors modulo unsafe code.
That said, I don’t have any good data on how much of a problem this is in practice. Modern c++ with a CI-pipeline doing static analysis and forbidding certain footguns is safe enough for most contexts. Personally, I’m exited about Rust more because I think that it’s a nicely designed language than because of its safety guarantees, but it doesn’t really have the ecosystem support for a lot of things, like gamedev or ui at the moment.
There is a lot of fanboying in discussions like these, so I understand if you’re weary of that. That said I don’t think static analysis tools are a very good point of comparison for (what I’m assuming that you’re referring to) Rusts ownership system.
While static analysis tools certainly can be useful for some classes of errors, there are types of errors that they can’t catch that the borrowchecker can. This is because the language are built around them in Rust. Rusts lifetime analysis is dependent on the user adding lifetime annotations in certain situations, so since c++ doesn’t have these annotations static analysis tools for c++ can’t benefit from the information these annotations provide.
Furthermore, c++ suffers from being an old language with a lot of features. Legacy features can allow for various loopholes that are hard for a static analysis tool to reason about.
C++ static analysis tools can find errors, but Rusts borrowchecker can prove the absence of errors modulo unsafe code.
That said, I don’t have any good data on how much of a problem this is in practice. Modern c++ with a CI-pipeline doing static analysis and forbidding certain footguns is safe enough for most contexts. Personally, I’m exited about Rust more because I think that it’s a nicely designed language than because of its safety guarantees, but it doesn’t really have the ecosystem support for a lot of things, like gamedev or ui at the moment.