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I still believe in the dream of the mythical Graydon Backdoor in OCaml. No one could even be mad, it would be so good.
by Gankro 10y ago
I still believe in the dream of the mythical Graydon Backdoor in OCaml. No one could even be mad, it would be so good.
- kibwen 10y agoEventually it will be revealed that he even bothered to politely document the backdoor in the Rust reference manual, confident that nobody would ever, ever believe anything found in the reference manual.
- steveklabnik 10y agoIIRC, last time he was asked about this, he said something like "I consider it a great compliment that someone thinks I'm smart enough to have done this, I assure you I am not."
- foota 10y agoTil the google results for "Graydon Backdoor" are... interesting.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWhat is the OCaml Graydon Backdoor? I can't find any reference to it.
- Manishearth 10y agorustc was originally written in OCaml by Graydon Hoare. Hypothetically, Graydon could have inserted a trusting trust attack in the ocaml compiler that would also insert a version of itself inside rustc. Highly unlikely; very hard to do, but ... possible.
- Gankro 10y agoThe more impressive part is: that manages to self-preserve across hundreds of Rust language/compiler versions with wildly varying designs and semantics all the way up to today's version.
- steveklabnik 10y agoNB:hundreds is literal here. A little over 300 last I checked.
- Gankro 10y agoAbout this many: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/235d77457d80b549dad3ac36d94f235208a1eafb/src/snapshots.txt https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/235d77457d80b549dad3a... (This file is no longer in master because the compiler bootstraps from the previous stable release; too lazy to accurately isolate the last time it was updated)
- steveklabnik 10y agoYup, plus since you need to compile three times on each one, to do the bootstrapping...
- duaneb 10y agoThat would be some gorgeous code to maintain itself successfully all this time.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]