I'm not trying to say it's useless. :) I think it's very valuable, but we need to be honest about its shortcomings rather than viewing it as a sheer win. A language like Rust is completely worthless if it's not fast; we've got a dozen languages that are already memory-safe and within 2x the speed of C. Given that Rust's plethora of safety mechanisms mean that numeric overflow can't cause memory unsafety, I completely understand why they would take the practical route rather than the theoretically-perfect route (even if, as predicted, they get crucified for it by armchair language designers).