4 ms·

Rust 1.34.2

117 points by pietroalbini 7y ago

wongarsu 7y ago
> The Error::type_id method was recently stabilized as part of Rust 1.34.0. This point release destabilizes it So in summary a feature that was stable for 3 days is taken back for further bugfixing. A bit unfortunate but given the very short timeframe where it was stable the impact should be minimal.
- josteink 7y ago
  The best bugs are short-lived bugs.
  - wyldfire 7y ago
    In this case I think it's a short-lived feature.
  - nudq 7y ago
    The worst kind of stability is short-lived stability.
    - mk_chan 7y ago
      Still better than hidden instability
- sanxiyn 7y ago
  A month and 3 days, but yeah.
- wyldfire 7y ago
  > So in summary a feature that was stable for 3 days is taken back for further bugfixing. It seems like such a terribly subtle bug. I wonder, how was it discovered (so quickly)?
  - kibwen 7y ago
    Rust releases spend six weeks in beta, and each individual feature can spend an unlimited amount of time baking in nightly, which is usually enough time to catch potential soundness issues before they find their way into stable (this is the second point release that I can recall having such a purpose). The particular feature under which this API falls has been in nightly for quite a while, so it may be that someone had a half-formed idea of how to trigger memory unsafety and was only reminded of it when they read the release notes where its stabilization was mentioned.
    - wyldfire 7y ago
      > so it may be that someone had a half-formed idea of how to trigger memory unsafety So someone just had the idea to test the new feature for soundness? It's not as if someone ran some kind of fuzzing or updated a formal methods model? If so, I think it's great that there's vigilant folks out there who try to break new features like this.
      - Ari_Rahikkala 7y ago
        Could be it just came across the right pair of eyes. It's quite reminiscent of the old EvilIx problem in Haskell, where you can break memory safety without doing anything explicitly marked unsafe: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2006-December/019994.html https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2006-Decembe...
      - kibwen 7y ago
        There are a few places in Rust and its stdlib that people seek to validate with formal methods, but usually these efforts are first focused on proving fundamental pieces (such as std::pin https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/pin/index.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/pin/index.html , which I believe has been integrated into Ralf Jung's formal model), and only later on outlying APIs such as this (the rationale being that fundamental APIs would be enormously more disruptive to fix if unsoundness should be discovered). As to your conclusion though, obligatory shout-out to Huon Wilson, who discovered the one other instance of unsoundness in a newly-stabilized API (this one due to a typo, therefore much simpler to resolve), mere hours after the stable release of Rust 1.15: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5roiq7/announcing_rust_115/dd8vujs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5roiq7/announcing_rus... :)
xvilka 7y ago
By the way, does anyone know any success stories of using Rust for writing business logic/software?
- nicolashahn 7y ago
  https://www.figma.com/blog/rust-in-production-at-figma/ https://www.figma.com/blog/rust-in-production-at-figma/
- oulipo 7y ago
  We use (and we love!) Rust at https://snips.ai https://snips.ai, you can take a look at a recent optimized neural network library we have open-sourced which uses Rust! https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-open-sources-tract-cdc50f437ef2 https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-open-sources-tract-cdc50f4...
- orthecreedence 7y ago
  We use it for Turtl (https://github.com/turtl/core-rs https://github.com/turtl/core-rs). I converted a huge portion of the business logic from js -> rust to make it embeddable in a lot of different platforms (by exposing a C api). Very successful, much more stable and fast than its JS ancestor.

117 points by pietroalbini 7y ago

> The Error::type_id method was recently stabilized as part of Rust 1.34.0. This point release destabilizes it So in summary a feature that was stable for 3 days is taken back for further bugfixing. A bit unfortunate but given the very short timeframe where it was stable the impact should be minimal.

josteink 7y ago
The best bugs are short-lived bugs.
- wyldfire 7y ago
  In this case I think it's a short-lived feature.
- nudq 7y ago
  The worst kind of stability is short-lived stability.
  - mk_chan 7y ago
    Still better than hidden instability
sanxiyn 7y ago
A month and 3 days, but yeah.
wyldfire 7y ago
> So in summary a feature that was stable for 3 days is taken back for further bugfixing. It seems like such a terribly subtle bug. I wonder, how was it discovered (so quickly)?
- kibwen 7y ago
  Rust releases spend six weeks in beta, and each individual feature can spend an unlimited amount of time baking in nightly, which is usually enough time to catch potential soundness issues before they find their way into stable (this is the second point release that I can recall having such a purpose). The particular feature under which this API falls has been in nightly for quite a while, so it may be that someone had a half-formed idea of how to trigger memory unsafety and was only reminded of it when they read the release notes where its stabilization was mentioned.
  - wyldfire 7y ago
    > so it may be that someone had a half-formed idea of how to trigger memory unsafety So someone just had the idea to test the new feature for soundness? It's not as if someone ran some kind of fuzzing or updated a formal methods model? If so, I think it's great that there's vigilant folks out there who try to break new features like this.
    - Ari_Rahikkala 7y ago
      Could be it just came across the right pair of eyes. It's quite reminiscent of the old EvilIx problem in Haskell, where you can break memory safety without doing anything explicitly marked unsafe: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2006-December/019994.html https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2006-Decembe...
    - kibwen 7y ago
      There are a few places in Rust and its stdlib that people seek to validate with formal methods, but usually these efforts are first focused on proving fundamental pieces (such as std::pin https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/pin/index.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/pin/index.html , which I believe has been integrated into Ralf Jung's formal model), and only later on outlying APIs such as this (the rationale being that fundamental APIs would be enormously more disruptive to fix if unsoundness should be discovered). As to your conclusion though, obligatory shout-out to Huon Wilson, who discovered the one other instance of unsoundness in a newly-stabilized API (this one due to a typo, therefore much simpler to resolve), mere hours after the stable release of Rust 1.15: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5roiq7/announcing_rust_115/dd8vujs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5roiq7/announcing_rus... :)

xvilka 7y ago

By the way, does anyone know any success stories of using Rust for writing business logic/software?

nicolashahn 7y ago
https://www.figma.com/blog/rust-in-production-at-figma/ https://www.figma.com/blog/rust-in-production-at-figma/
oulipo 7y ago
We use (and we love!) Rust at https://snips.ai https://snips.ai, you can take a look at a recent optimized neural network library we have open-sourced which uses Rust! https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-open-sources-tract-cdc50f437ef2 https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-open-sources-tract-cdc50f4...
orthecreedence 7y ago
We use it for Turtl (https://github.com/turtl/core-rs https://github.com/turtl/core-rs). I converted a huge portion of the business logic from js -> rust to make it embeddable in a lot of different platforms (by exposing a C api). Very successful, much more stable and fast than its JS ancestor.