5 ms·

> Funding > We expect this to be a significant undertaking (likely many full time developer-years of effort), and as such, it is something that will require pai

> Funding > We expect this to be a significant undertaking (likely many full time developer-years of effort), and as such, it is something that will require paid effort to make real. It is an ambitious undertaking, but strikes me more like a way to try to make more money off of Rust. It is definitely a moonshot since Ada has a 35-year lead here since it has been used for critical systems since the 1980s. Ada 2020 will be out soon and pulls in several of the innovative ideas that Rust pioneered. I am not saying that it is not possible, I am just skeptical of the reasons for trying to push Rust in the critical systems direction so suddenly.

nickpsecurity 7y ago
The main thing going for it is that it's not Ada. Most C and C++ developers don't want to use Ada. Some of them are adopting Rust. It also has a strong community and ecosystem. That was its key advantage. Finally, it has temporal safety that Ada doesn't with its borrow checker. What Ada has on it are its IDE's, MDD, and testing tools that industry is currently using. With stuff like RV-Match and Astree Analyzer, MISRA-C is probably safer than Rust. Rust needs more tooling to be competitive.
- carlmr 7y ago
  Normal rust without warnings to me is much safer than most Misra C compliant code. Misra C is an attempt to avoid 80% of C's undefined behavior and other pitfalls, but those 20% that are left are still worse than most of what can go wrong in rust. The problem is mostly certification and having a stable spec for the language.
- carlmr 7y ago
  Normal rust without warnings to me is much safer than most Misra C compliant code. Misra C is an attempt to avoid 80% of C's undefined behavior and other pitfalls, but those 20% that are left are still worse than most of what can go wrong in rust. The tooling that is needed is mostly productivity tooling, like better code completion (rust analyzer is now pretty promising after RLS kind of stagnated). And maybe better ways to show code coverage. The problem for usage in safety critical areas is mostly certification and having a stable spec for the language.
  - kahlonel 7y ago
    Where did you get this 80%/20% figures from?
    - carlmr 7y ago
      Rough numbers from experience of what these analyzers discover and what actually turns out to be a bug, vs. What rust keeps you from doing out of the box. I could have said a lot or a little, but I wanted to convey an idea of how much and how little. Lacking a strict type system, discriminated unions, if-expressions (they exist in C but are often discouraged because of readability concerns), match expressions, macros that are AST members, procedural macros, guaranteed mutability restrictions with the borrow checker, etc. are things that a coding rule and analyzer can't bring into a language like C. Most importantly no module system to keep yourself somewhat isolated from third party code that you have no control over. Add to that that you have humans checking each violation whether they think it will cause problems. Humans fixing these. And in a lot of cases humans not fixing these. Then you're actually still left with a lot of code that à stricter compiler like Rust or Ada would have rejected in the first place.
  - nickpsecurity 7y ago
    Remember there's tools that can prove absence of or detect many classes of error in C with no runtime checks. RV-Match and Astree Analyzer come to mind. Plus all kinds of test generators and a verified compiler. Plus lots of open tooling to do same thing. Safety-critical vendors buy that kind of stuff more than most C shops. C subset with such tooling is safer and more correct than Rust. The advantage of Ada and Rust is they're cheaper and faster to get safe code out of. Businesses will like that. I don't know how compiler qualification plays out these days.
    - carlmr 7y ago
      I'll repeat this from another comment. There are a few things a coding standard like Misra can't do for you. Lacking a strict type system, discriminated unions, if-expressions (they exist in C but are often discouraged because of readability concerns), match expressions, macros that are AST members, procedural macros, guaranteed mutability restrictions with the borrow checker, etc. are things that a coding rule and analyzer can't bring into a language like C. Most importantly no module system to keep yourself somewhat isolated from third party code that you have no control over. Add to that that you have humans checking each violation whether they think it will cause problems. Humans fixing these. And in a lot of cases humans not fixing these. Then you're actually still left with a lot of code that a stricter compiler like Rust or Ada would have rejected in the first place.
- irundebian 7y ago
  How does Rust compare to Spark/Ada?
  - nickpsecurity 7y ago
    I don't know them well enough to compare. Haven't been coding in a while. Best resource on Ada to do that comparison is Barnes: https://www.adacore.com/books/safe-and-secure-software https://www.adacore.com/books/safe-and-secure-software SPARK is a subset without pointers that feeds information about the program into solvers that prove absence of common classes of errors like overflows and divide by zero. Inspired by Rust, recent work is adding pointers. Praxis' Correct-by-Construction defaulted on Ada with SPARK saved for most critical stuff, esp safety- or security-enforcing. Right now, Rust is mainly ahead of Ada on dealing with the pointer safety and better safe concurrency. Ada's Ravenscar aimed for safety but was restrictive. That's my take.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Like nichsecurity states, Rust is ahead in pointer safety, but that is being taken care for Ada 2020, even if just a subset. Ada/SPARK wins in almost everything else, it has multiple implementations, proven industrial use since early 80's (first standard was in 1983), IDE tooling, it is a common theme in high security computing conferences, libraries for safety critical domains, and people that know the language. Naturally it has a price disadvantage for FOSS devs that are allergic to GNAT, given that the remaining Ada compilers are well into the enterprise price range.
Argorak 7y ago
It isn't sudden, there's a lot of verification work for Rust already going on, e.g. the Rust Belt Project. I don't see how delaying would help in the long run. (Full disclosure: I'm MD at Ferrous Systems)
hobofan 7y ago
> It is an ambitious undertaking, but strikes me more like a way to try to make more money off of Rust. There is nothing wrong with making money off of Rust, and one of the goals of this standardization is to erase doubts that Rust is ready for commercial prime time. The proposed specification and standardization effort is a enormous undertaking and asking for that effort to be payed for is fair (they even spell out the two funding alternatives). If you are trying to say that this is a quick cash-grab by Ferrous Systems, you should also consider that their members have been doing a lot of upaid work for a _long_ time for Rust and its community and most of the time without direct monetary benefit.
- thesuperbigfrog 7y ago
  > There is nothing wrong with making money off of Rust, and one of the goals of this standardization is to erase doubts that Rust is ready for commercial prime time. Agreed. After what Oracle has done with Java, I am hesitant when corporations come bearing gifts. > If you are trying to say that this is a quick cash-grab by Ferrous Systems, you should also consider that their members have been doing a lot of upaid work for a _long_ time for Rust and its community and most of the time without direct monetary benefit. I am not making any accusations against Ferrous Systems. I have no reason to believe that they are not well-intentioned. I am just concerned about what might happen to the Rust community when truckloads of money gets involved. Rust has an incredible community and has made rapid progress. I hope that it continues that way.
  - kbenson 7y ago
    > I am just concerned about what might happen to the Rust community when truckloads of money gets involved. Well, either truckloads of money get involved, or the community will fail to grow. I'm sure some people would love to keep the Rust community exactly as they currently enjoy it (for a multitude of different reasons, but I think most of them somewhat selfish), but for Rust to grow, there has to be money involved by the nature of how our economy works. Either Rust is useful and provides benefit over alternatives, in which case it's also useful and provides benefit for commercial interests, or it isn't. That isn't to say your concern is entirely unwarranted. It makes sense to be leery about what the money is applied to and how it influences the outcomes, as that isn't in the best interest of the community either.
Xylakant 7y ago
Disclosure: I’m one of the founders of ferrous, though I’m the one with practically no involvement in the Rust community. To be quite honest here: Ferrous is a for-profit endeavor, but my co-founders and most of our employees both have been involved in the rust community for a long time. We’re also sponsoring conferences, speakers, open source projects in the rust space since the beginning, for example rust-analyzer (1) So yes, we intend to find funding, people working on this need to be paid. People doing the organizational legwork (such as running the company, keeping the office tidy, making sure there’s enough coffee) need to be paid. Standards documents need to be paid. This isn’t something we as a 6-people company can self-fund. But we intend to make as much of this open source as possible. If there’s sufficient funding, all of it. On the other side, we’ve been at embedded conferences (even before ferrous as a company was a thing), talking to people in the automobile, robotics and aerospace sector and the question of “is this certified/certifiable” has come up quite a few times. There’s definite interest in finding a replacement for C in that space, and that’s where rust could shine. It’s certainly early, but this is not a project that will come to fruition in the short run. It’s something that rust could profit from in a decade. (1) https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer/blob/master/R...
- thesuperbigfrog 7y ago
  Thank you for what your developers have done for Rust. I wish Ferrous Systems the best in the Sealed Rust project. Despite being entrenched, Ada needs the competition in the critical systems space. Rust is showing great promise as a competitor.
  - Argorak 7y ago
    I have talked to a couple of AdaCore folks personally and the competition is friendly, because Rust brings movement into the space. We also respect Ada a ton and fundamentally believe that clients having actual choice improves all products.

nickpsecurity 7y ago

The main thing going for it is that it's not Ada. Most C and C++ developers don't want to use Ada. Some of them are adopting Rust. It also has a strong community and ecosystem. That was its key advantage. Finally, it has temporal safety that Ada doesn't with its borrow checker. What Ada has on it are its IDE's, MDD, and testing tools that industry is currently using. With stuff like RV-Match and Astree Analyzer, MISRA-C is probably safer than Rust. Rust needs more tooling to be competitive.

carlmr 7y ago
Normal rust without warnings to me is much safer than most Misra C compliant code. Misra C is an attempt to avoid 80% of C's undefined behavior and other pitfalls, but those 20% that are left are still worse than most of what can go wrong in rust. The problem is mostly certification and having a stable spec for the language.
carlmr 7y ago
Normal rust without warnings to me is much safer than most Misra C compliant code. Misra C is an attempt to avoid 80% of C's undefined behavior and other pitfalls, but those 20% that are left are still worse than most of what can go wrong in rust. The tooling that is needed is mostly productivity tooling, like better code completion (rust analyzer is now pretty promising after RLS kind of stagnated). And maybe better ways to show code coverage. The problem for usage in safety critical areas is mostly certification and having a stable spec for the language.
- kahlonel 7y ago
  Where did you get this 80%/20% figures from?
  - carlmr 7y ago
    Rough numbers from experience of what these analyzers discover and what actually turns out to be a bug, vs. What rust keeps you from doing out of the box. I could have said a lot or a little, but I wanted to convey an idea of how much and how little. Lacking a strict type system, discriminated unions, if-expressions (they exist in C but are often discouraged because of readability concerns), match expressions, macros that are AST members, procedural macros, guaranteed mutability restrictions with the borrow checker, etc. are things that a coding rule and analyzer can't bring into a language like C. Most importantly no module system to keep yourself somewhat isolated from third party code that you have no control over. Add to that that you have humans checking each violation whether they think it will cause problems. Humans fixing these. And in a lot of cases humans not fixing these. Then you're actually still left with a lot of code that à stricter compiler like Rust or Ada would have rejected in the first place.
- nickpsecurity 7y ago
  Remember there's tools that can prove absence of or detect many classes of error in C with no runtime checks. RV-Match and Astree Analyzer come to mind. Plus all kinds of test generators and a verified compiler. Plus lots of open tooling to do same thing. Safety-critical vendors buy that kind of stuff more than most C shops. C subset with such tooling is safer and more correct than Rust. The advantage of Ada and Rust is they're cheaper and faster to get safe code out of. Businesses will like that. I don't know how compiler qualification plays out these days.
  - carlmr 7y ago
    I'll repeat this from another comment. There are a few things a coding standard like Misra can't do for you. Lacking a strict type system, discriminated unions, if-expressions (they exist in C but are often discouraged because of readability concerns), match expressions, macros that are AST members, procedural macros, guaranteed mutability restrictions with the borrow checker, etc. are things that a coding rule and analyzer can't bring into a language like C. Most importantly no module system to keep yourself somewhat isolated from third party code that you have no control over. Add to that that you have humans checking each violation whether they think it will cause problems. Humans fixing these. And in a lot of cases humans not fixing these. Then you're actually still left with a lot of code that a stricter compiler like Rust or Ada would have rejected in the first place.
irundebian 7y ago
How does Rust compare to Spark/Ada?
- nickpsecurity 7y ago
  I don't know them well enough to compare. Haven't been coding in a while. Best resource on Ada to do that comparison is Barnes: https://www.adacore.com/books/safe-and-secure-software https://www.adacore.com/books/safe-and-secure-software SPARK is a subset without pointers that feeds information about the program into solvers that prove absence of common classes of errors like overflows and divide by zero. Inspired by Rust, recent work is adding pointers. Praxis' Correct-by-Construction defaulted on Ada with SPARK saved for most critical stuff, esp safety- or security-enforcing. Right now, Rust is mainly ahead of Ada on dealing with the pointer safety and better safe concurrency. Ada's Ravenscar aimed for safety but was restrictive. That's my take.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Like nichsecurity states, Rust is ahead in pointer safety, but that is being taken care for Ada 2020, even if just a subset. Ada/SPARK wins in almost everything else, it has multiple implementations, proven industrial use since early 80's (first standard was in 1983), IDE tooling, it is a common theme in high security computing conferences, libraries for safety critical domains, and people that know the language. Naturally it has a price disadvantage for FOSS devs that are allergic to GNAT, given that the remaining Ada compilers are well into the enterprise price range.

Argorak 7y ago

It isn't sudden, there's a lot of verification work for Rust already going on, e.g. the Rust Belt Project. I don't see how delaying would help in the long run. (Full disclosure: I'm MD at Ferrous Systems)

hobofan 7y ago

> It is an ambitious undertaking, but strikes me more like a way to try to make more money off of Rust. There is nothing wrong with making money off of Rust, and one of the goals of this standardization is to erase doubts that Rust is ready for commercial prime time. The proposed specification and standardization effort is a enormous undertaking and asking for that effort to be payed for is fair (they even spell out the two funding alternatives). If you are trying to say that this is a quick cash-grab by Ferrous Systems, you should also consider that their members have been doing a lot of upaid work for a _long_ time for Rust and its community and most of the time without direct monetary benefit.

thesuperbigfrog 7y ago
> There is nothing wrong with making money off of Rust, and one of the goals of this standardization is to erase doubts that Rust is ready for commercial prime time. Agreed. After what Oracle has done with Java, I am hesitant when corporations come bearing gifts. > If you are trying to say that this is a quick cash-grab by Ferrous Systems, you should also consider that their members have been doing a lot of upaid work for a _long_ time for Rust and its community and most of the time without direct monetary benefit. I am not making any accusations against Ferrous Systems. I have no reason to believe that they are not well-intentioned. I am just concerned about what might happen to the Rust community when truckloads of money gets involved. Rust has an incredible community and has made rapid progress. I hope that it continues that way.
- kbenson 7y ago
  > I am just concerned about what might happen to the Rust community when truckloads of money gets involved. Well, either truckloads of money get involved, or the community will fail to grow. I'm sure some people would love to keep the Rust community exactly as they currently enjoy it (for a multitude of different reasons, but I think most of them somewhat selfish), but for Rust to grow, there has to be money involved by the nature of how our economy works. Either Rust is useful and provides benefit over alternatives, in which case it's also useful and provides benefit for commercial interests, or it isn't. That isn't to say your concern is entirely unwarranted. It makes sense to be leery about what the money is applied to and how it influences the outcomes, as that isn't in the best interest of the community either.

Xylakant 7y ago

Disclosure: I’m one of the founders of ferrous, though I’m the one with practically no involvement in the Rust community. To be quite honest here: Ferrous is a for-profit endeavor, but my co-founders and most of our employees both have been involved in the rust community for a long time. We’re also sponsoring conferences, speakers, open source projects in the rust space since the beginning, for example rust-analyzer (1) So yes, we intend to find funding, people working on this need to be paid. People doing the organizational legwork (such as running the company, keeping the office tidy, making sure there’s enough coffee) need to be paid. Standards documents need to be paid. This isn’t something we as a 6-people company can self-fund. But we intend to make as much of this open source as possible. If there’s sufficient funding, all of it. On the other side, we’ve been at embedded conferences (even before ferrous as a company was a thing), talking to people in the automobile, robotics and aerospace sector and the question of “is this certified/certifiable” has come up quite a few times. There’s definite interest in finding a replacement for C in that space, and that’s where rust could shine. It’s certainly early, but this is not a project that will come to fruition in the short run. It’s something that rust could profit from in a decade. (1) https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer/blob/master/R...

thesuperbigfrog 7y ago
Thank you for what your developers have done for Rust. I wish Ferrous Systems the best in the Sealed Rust project. Despite being entrenched, Ada needs the competition in the critical systems space. Rust is showing great promise as a competitor.
- Argorak 7y ago
  I have talked to a couple of AdaCore folks personally and the competition is friendly, because Rust brings movement into the space. We also respect Ada a ton and fundamentally believe that clients having actual choice improves all products.