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I have no doubt that Rust could save some sort of bugs. If you read all the comment i´ve made, you will see that we are talking about a massive codebase already

I have no doubt that Rust could save some sort of bugs. If you read all the comment i´ve made, you will see that we are talking about a massive codebase already coded in C++. Giving the time it is alive, all the engineering hours, investiments, tools, etc.. most of the bugs that Rust could have prevented right on the beggining are already covered (Chrome also uses fuzzers and static analysis tools to automate C++ code) > This year alone saw 2 issues from Project Zero in Chrome that would have been prevented by Rust Thanks for making my point even clearer. If you really knew the size of the codebase, having only 2 issues on Project Zero is kind of a compliment to Chrome. By the way, it was yesterday, that i´ve saw a research with fuzzers applied in C, C++ and Rust codebases. In that research, Rust had the same overall count of bugs and even some 'zero day' sort of ones not any different from C++ and C codebases (maybe just better than the C one). Its a pitty i can find where it is (I´ve saw it on Twitter, but its pretty recent). > Chromium is an incredibly security-sensitive piece of software, and that really is an excellent fit for Rust. It's not a boogeyman argument and the Chromium team themselves are the ones pursuing it, it's not being forced on them. A Chrome started from zero in 2020? probably.. but thats not the reality here. Millions of lines of C++ code, and its not just a matter of language, but the knowledge and people with the know-how to write those pieces.. Thats why im saying is not worth it..

mrich 6y ago
You also have to consider the huge investment that testing takes. Not only person days spent writing tests, but also infrastructure costs for running fuzzers, huge test suites and so on. And although the code base is already there and tested, it constantly changes, so there is no way to just incrementally test it. At some point you have to make some advances in the way you approach software development, not everything can be handled by brute force.
- oscargrouch 6y ago
  It would cost much more to rewrite in Rust. Again thats why im saying that if the project would start now in 2020, all of those would be pretty good points. Right now is too late for that. As another example, you can get just the V8 VM for instance. For start, with the ammount of solid code out there it would be nuts to talk over a rewrite.. Now imagine if we add to that, that the knowledge on JIT compilers is so difficult to grasp, that you would also need to have those same great engineers in the new language/platform you are planning the rewrite. Giving the age of Rust, and giving you already have a bad time of finding those in the much older C++, imagine the time it takes to have the same quality people in Rust. I know a lot of people are bully about Rust, but in reality things are not that simple. (On the bright side, is not that hard to taught a C++ engineer to code in Rust)
  - roca 6y ago
    If you care about security, it is much easier to write non-exploitable code in Rust than in C++, and you can hire accordingly. Actually, the people who are really experienced at writing secure code in C++ understand that they can't do it reliably, and an increasing number of them (like me) would much rather write Rust code instead for that reason. So for secure code the hiring advantage is tilting away from C++ towards Rust.
    - rvz 6y ago
      Yet once the Chromium team goes down that Rust to C++ FFI route, they will encounter the same old bugs outlined in this paper. [0] They might as well fork Servo and create their own engine from that, but even that is still a prototype worked on for years with zero C++ at least. It's too early to see how the Chromium team will begin to work on this given it's only a plan, but maybe the unsafety and security issues are enough motivation to actually use Rust to C++ interop or a rewrite. But once again, this has been tried by some other projects and by just looking at the effort of a rewrite, they later concluded that it is not worth it. [1] [2] Even better, just improve Servo instead. But I guess they would rather create their own fork, just like they did with WebKit. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03296.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03296.pdf [1] https://blogs.dust3d.org/2019/03/13/why-i-rewrote-the-mesh-generator-of-dust3d-from-rust-to-cplusplus/ https://blogs.dust3d.org/2019/03/13/why-i-rewrote-the-mesh-g... [2] http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-in-c.html http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i...
      - roca 6y ago
        None of this logic follows. Paper [0] categorizes bugs in unsafe Rust code. "There will be some bugs in FFI code" does not imply "no benefit to using Rust if there is C++ FFI". Many projects, including Firefox, have found Rust is really helpful even if you have C++ FFI.
steveklabnik 6y ago
By the way, there's a lot of questions about the methodology of that paper: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/icaf19/we_tested_the_limited_number_of_utilities_in_rust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/icaf19/we_tested_the_...
- oscargrouch 6y ago
  To be fair Steve, i didnt use this as to invalidate the assumptions on Rust. Just that we need to be more carefull to just take things for granted. Im not even taken this research for granted, and are waiting for further work to really prove the points, or even going against them. Im just using as a cautionary tale for people going too fast on some assumptions, and not taking care to study sample by sample. I have no doubt that Rust have a great future ahead of it. But it will take more time and lines of code to turn all of those wishes people have into reality.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    Absolutely. I am very interested to see how everything plays out in the future.
iulian_r 6y ago
> In that research, Rust had the same overall count of bugs and even some 'zero day' sort of ones not any different from C++ and C codebases (maybe just better than the C one). That's actually not entirely true. One of the problems was the program taking too long to compete due to suboptimal algorithm. The GitHub repo showed that the tests were run using debug version of the Rust binary. It worked fine when people tried to reproduce using the release version. For the other two problems, not many details were given, but both programs panicked immediately with the given input. That's still better than any kind of undefined behaviour or silent error.
staticassertion 6y ago
> most of the bugs that Rust could have prevented right on the beggining are already covered (Chrome also uses fuzzers and static analysis tools to automate C++ code) This isn't even close to true... https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2020/08/stable-channel-update-for-desktop_18.html https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2020/08/stable-channel... Here's one from just this month. Here's another from just this month with another fifteen issues: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2020/08/stable-channel-update-for-desktop.html https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2020/08/stable-channel... There are hundreds a year like this. I could find many, many, many more.

mrich 6y ago

You also have to consider the huge investment that testing takes. Not only person days spent writing tests, but also infrastructure costs for running fuzzers, huge test suites and so on. And although the code base is already there and tested, it constantly changes, so there is no way to just incrementally test it. At some point you have to make some advances in the way you approach software development, not everything can be handled by brute force.

oscargrouch 6y ago
It would cost much more to rewrite in Rust. Again thats why im saying that if the project would start now in 2020, all of those would be pretty good points. Right now is too late for that. As another example, you can get just the V8 VM for instance. For start, with the ammount of solid code out there it would be nuts to talk over a rewrite.. Now imagine if we add to that, that the knowledge on JIT compilers is so difficult to grasp, that you would also need to have those same great engineers in the new language/platform you are planning the rewrite. Giving the age of Rust, and giving you already have a bad time of finding those in the much older C++, imagine the time it takes to have the same quality people in Rust. I know a lot of people are bully about Rust, but in reality things are not that simple. (On the bright side, is not that hard to taught a C++ engineer to code in Rust)
- roca 6y ago
  If you care about security, it is much easier to write non-exploitable code in Rust than in C++, and you can hire accordingly. Actually, the people who are really experienced at writing secure code in C++ understand that they can't do it reliably, and an increasing number of them (like me) would much rather write Rust code instead for that reason. So for secure code the hiring advantage is tilting away from C++ towards Rust.
  - rvz 6y ago
    Yet once the Chromium team goes down that Rust to C++ FFI route, they will encounter the same old bugs outlined in this paper. [0] They might as well fork Servo and create their own engine from that, but even that is still a prototype worked on for years with zero C++ at least. It's too early to see how the Chromium team will begin to work on this given it's only a plan, but maybe the unsafety and security issues are enough motivation to actually use Rust to C++ interop or a rewrite. But once again, this has been tried by some other projects and by just looking at the effort of a rewrite, they later concluded that it is not worth it. [1] [2] Even better, just improve Servo instead. But I guess they would rather create their own fork, just like they did with WebKit. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03296.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03296.pdf [1] https://blogs.dust3d.org/2019/03/13/why-i-rewrote-the-mesh-generator-of-dust3d-from-rust-to-cplusplus/ https://blogs.dust3d.org/2019/03/13/why-i-rewrote-the-mesh-g... [2] http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-in-c.html http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i...
    - roca 6y ago
      None of this logic follows. Paper [0] categorizes bugs in unsafe Rust code. "There will be some bugs in FFI code" does not imply "no benefit to using Rust if there is C++ FFI". Many projects, including Firefox, have found Rust is really helpful even if you have C++ FFI.

steveklabnik 6y ago

By the way, there's a lot of questions about the methodology of that paper: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/icaf19/we_tested_the_limited_number_of_utilities_in_rust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/icaf19/we_tested_the_...

oscargrouch 6y ago
To be fair Steve, i didnt use this as to invalidate the assumptions on Rust. Just that we need to be more carefull to just take things for granted. Im not even taken this research for granted, and are waiting for further work to really prove the points, or even going against them. Im just using as a cautionary tale for people going too fast on some assumptions, and not taking care to study sample by sample. I have no doubt that Rust have a great future ahead of it. But it will take more time and lines of code to turn all of those wishes people have into reality.
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  Absolutely. I am very interested to see how everything plays out in the future.

iulian_r 6y ago

> In that research, Rust had the same overall count of bugs and even some 'zero day' sort of ones not any different from C++ and C codebases (maybe just better than the C one). That's actually not entirely true. One of the problems was the program taking too long to compete due to suboptimal algorithm. The GitHub repo showed that the tests were run using debug version of the Rust binary. It worked fine when people tried to reproduce using the release version. For the other two problems, not many details were given, but both programs panicked immediately with the given input. That's still better than any kind of undefined behaviour or silent error.

staticassertion 6y ago

> most of the bugs that Rust could have prevented right on the beggining are already covered (Chrome also uses fuzzers and static analysis tools to automate C++ code) This isn't even close to true... https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2020/08/stable-channel-update-for-desktop_18.html https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2020/08/stable-channel... Here's one from just this month. Here's another from just this month with another fifteen issues: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2020/08/stable-channel-update-for-desktop.html https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2020/08/stable-channel... There are hundreds a year like this. I could find many, many, many more.