They are generally better than nothing, however. And they do generally offer better performance, better predictability, an a simpler implementation than other approaches to memory management and garbage collection.
Maybe a language like Rust will offer a safer alternative at some point, but that point surely isn't today, and probably not tomorrow, either. Maybe there are other languages that offer better safety, but they often bring along their own set of very serious drawbacks.
In terms of writing relatively safe code today, that performs relatively well, that can integrate easily with other libraries/frameworks/code, and can be readily maintained, the use of C++ with modern C++ techniques is often the only truly viable option.
>Maybe a language like Rust will offer a safer alternative at some point, but that point surely isn't today, and probably not tomorrow, either.
Rust absolutely does offer a safer alternative today. The only problem with Rust at this point is that the standard library is in a state of great flux, which makes it hard to use the language for serious projects. But the memory safety is there.
And even with all the changes, there are at least a couple of companies using the last tagged release of Rust in production.
That said, I fervently hope that Rust can hit 1.0 soon (as in this year). A lot of people are looking to move on from C and C++ at this point, but a lot are moving to Go, D, or Nimrod because Rust has been beta for so long (yes, I know Go is technically not in the same tier as Rust, D, and Nimrod). Once they put in the effort of learning these languages, they're unlikely to switch to Rust, thus missing out on all the safety guarantees that Rust offers.
Maybe a language like Rust will offer a safer alternative at some point, but that point surely isn't today, and probably not tomorrow, either. Maybe there are other languages that offer better safety, but they often bring along their own set of very serious drawbacks.
In terms of writing relatively safe code today, that performs relatively well, that can integrate easily with other libraries/frameworks/code, and can be readily maintained, the use of C++ with modern C++ techniques is often the only truly viable option.