4 ms·

No, just use Rust...

swsieber 8y ago
Well, that wouldn't eliminate everything (row-hammer, speculative execution), but it would probably get rid of the most common culprits - buffer overflows and use after free.
- phkahler 8y ago
  Things like row hammer will not get attention until they are commonly used. Rust does eliminate the most common vulnerabilities and should be seriously considered for any new project that would otherwise be written in C.
  - swsieber 8y ago
    Oh, I completely agree. It's just easy to overstate Rust's guarantees, which doesn't do anybody any good.
rurban 8y ago
Nonsense. Rust safeties are massively overhyped. Not enough memory safety (comparable to Java, which is similarily memory unsafe), no type safety (unsafe keyword), not enough concurrency safety (not deadlock free, need to manually set mutexes). While there do exist safe and fast languages, Rust is not one of them.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  If we all wrote in languages as memory-safe as Java, almost all these security bugs would go away. Is Rust guaranteed to be 100% memory-safe? No, there could always be bugs in the compiler and/or unsafe code. (Aside: it annoys me how people consider the presence of an unsafe keyword inherently less trustworthy than a non-verified compiler/runtime system, when there is really little difference between them.) Is it a huge improvement? Yes.
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    Full agreement, but I think unsafe-phobia is mostly about user-extensible nature of it. unsafe in standard library is okay, because as you said it's no more dangerous than doing it in runtime. unsafe in "your" library is not okay, because I don't trust you to modify runtime either.
    - rurban 8y ago
      unsafe memory and unsafe types are not okay if you widely claim to be memory safe. Thousands of people actually believe these lies, and companies do makes decisions on these claims. It's much more memory unsafe than Java in fact. Java recently removed the unsafe tricks, whilst rust was once safe and went more and more unsafe since.
- phkahler 8y ago
  >> Nonsense. Rust safeties are massively overhyped. No. They are not. You obviously have not done your homework on the subject.
  - rurban 8y ago
    Obviously not. I've only worked on two different compilers/languages which do provide all three safeties, while you probably wouldn't even be able to name a single one. It's embarrassing. It's a nice language, and safer than C/C++ but for sure not a safe one, even if thousands of newbies will repeat it constantly.

Well, that wouldn't eliminate everything (row-hammer, speculative execution), but it would probably get rid of the most common culprits - buffer overflows and use after free.

phkahler 8y ago
Things like row hammer will not get attention until they are commonly used. Rust does eliminate the most common vulnerabilities and should be seriously considered for any new project that would otherwise be written in C.
- swsieber 8y ago
  Oh, I completely agree. It's just easy to overstate Rust's guarantees, which doesn't do anybody any good.

rurban 8y ago

Nonsense. Rust safeties are massively overhyped. Not enough memory safety (comparable to Java, which is similarily memory unsafe), no type safety (unsafe keyword), not enough concurrency safety (not deadlock free, need to manually set mutexes). While there do exist safe and fast languages, Rust is not one of them.

pcwalton 8y ago
If we all wrote in languages as memory-safe as Java, almost all these security bugs would go away. Is Rust guaranteed to be 100% memory-safe? No, there could always be bugs in the compiler and/or unsafe code. (Aside: it annoys me how people consider the presence of an unsafe keyword inherently less trustworthy than a non-verified compiler/runtime system, when there is really little difference between them.) Is it a huge improvement? Yes.
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  Full agreement, but I think unsafe-phobia is mostly about user-extensible nature of it. unsafe in standard library is okay, because as you said it's no more dangerous than doing it in runtime. unsafe in "your" library is not okay, because I don't trust you to modify runtime either.
  - rurban 8y ago
    unsafe memory and unsafe types are not okay if you widely claim to be memory safe. Thousands of people actually believe these lies, and companies do makes decisions on these claims. It's much more memory unsafe than Java in fact. Java recently removed the unsafe tricks, whilst rust was once safe and went more and more unsafe since.
phkahler 8y ago
>> Nonsense. Rust safeties are massively overhyped. No. They are not. You obviously have not done your homework on the subject.
- rurban 8y ago
  Obviously not. I've only worked on two different compilers/languages which do provide all three safeties, while you probably wouldn't even be able to name a single one. It's embarrassing. It's a nice language, and safer than C/C++ but for sure not a safe one, even if thousands of newbies will repeat it constantly.