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Clearly you haven't done even basic research into Rust. That's OK, but I don't think you should be spouting off in HN comments about how useless it is. Rust is

Clearly you haven't done even basic research into Rust. That's OK, but I don't think you should be spouting off in HN comments about how useless it is. Rust is all about memory safety. The borrow checker gives you compile-time memory safety guarantees (sans unsafe blocks). The address of the struct you passed to some function which then took the address of an inner field and populated a value in a returned object? Yeah... Rust knows whether that's safe or you've set yourself up for a dangling pointer. Bounds-checking is child's play to Rust. The bulk (if not the majority) of high-impact security vulnerabilities are related to memory safety in some form. Rust eliminates those as an entire class of problem.

dreta 10y ago
I went through all the Rust features. It doesn’t eliminate memory safety issues at all.
- dbaupp 10y ago
  What's a specific memory safety issue Rust has outside `unsafe` code?
  - dreta 10y ago
    The memory safety issues happen inside of “unsafe” code, thus it doesn’t eliminate memory safety issues.
    - dbaupp 10y ago
      I don't think this is a useful point, because by the same logic: - Haskell doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when using unsafePerformIO (or Foreign.*Ptr, or inside the runtime, your choice), - Python doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when using ctypes, - JavaScript doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when calling into the C++ code of the browser, - Java doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when using JNI. All languages have some sort of escape hatch that can be used to drop to a lower level, in order to actually interface with the operating system (etc.), Rust is slightly unique in that it makes this escape hatch fairly explicit/prominent at the language level and also provides the power needed do that interfacing/implementation itself (additionally, one gets all the normal benefits of Rust inside `unsafe`, the feature just lets one do more, not change the semantics of existing code).
      - dreta 10y ago
        I never said i expect Rust to fix any of these problems, i would however expect it to at least try and introduce helpful constructs, instead of the ultimatum approach that every other language takes where you either program as expected or face the consequences.
        dbaupp 10y ago
        It does provide a pile of helpful constructs (references, slices, generics, privacy), which, if they don't work 100%, are still brilliant building blocks for creating abstractions that expose safe interfaces, allowing the areas where "program as expected" is required to be concentrated into controlled areas/libraries. (And, all those features still work in the unsafe code, helping the programmer get it correct.) It works really well in practice, even if it isn't bulletproof... there's nothing to stop a programmer typing 'unsafe' to side-step the safe interfaces in random places, but one quickly learns this is usually just heaping unnecessary debugger work on oneself, to track down little mistakes that the compiler would normally point to directly.
    - nnethercote 10y ago
      Some people say "half a hole is still a hole". To which I reply "but it's a much smaller hole".

dreta 10y ago

I went through all the Rust features. It doesn’t eliminate memory safety issues at all.

dbaupp 10y ago
What's a specific memory safety issue Rust has outside `unsafe` code?
- dreta 10y ago
  The memory safety issues happen inside of “unsafe” code, thus it doesn’t eliminate memory safety issues.
  - dbaupp 10y ago
    I don't think this is a useful point, because by the same logic: - Haskell doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when using unsafePerformIO (or Foreign.*Ptr, or inside the runtime, your choice), - Python doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when using ctypes, - JavaScript doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when calling into the C++ code of the browser, - Java doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when using JNI. All languages have some sort of escape hatch that can be used to drop to a lower level, in order to actually interface with the operating system (etc.), Rust is slightly unique in that it makes this escape hatch fairly explicit/prominent at the language level and also provides the power needed do that interfacing/implementation itself (additionally, one gets all the normal benefits of Rust inside `unsafe`, the feature just lets one do more, not change the semantics of existing code).
    - dreta 10y ago
      I never said i expect Rust to fix any of these problems, i would however expect it to at least try and introduce helpful constructs, instead of the ultimatum approach that every other language takes where you either program as expected or face the consequences.
      - dbaupp 10y ago
        It does provide a pile of helpful constructs (references, slices, generics, privacy), which, if they don't work 100%, are still brilliant building blocks for creating abstractions that expose safe interfaces, allowing the areas where "program as expected" is required to be concentrated into controlled areas/libraries. (And, all those features still work in the unsafe code, helping the programmer get it correct.) It works really well in practice, even if it isn't bulletproof... there's nothing to stop a programmer typing 'unsafe' to side-step the safe interfaces in random places, but one quickly learns this is usually just heaping unnecessary debugger work on oneself, to track down little mistakes that the compiler would normally point to directly.
  - nnethercote 10y ago
    Some people say "half a hole is still a hole". To which I reply "but it's a much smaller hole".