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Actix-web makes some very aggressive use of unsafe. Many core Rust libraries do too. If you trust those authors (some very fresh out of school) to have zero mis

by sk2020 6y ago

Actix-web makes some very aggressive use of unsafe. Many core Rust libraries do too. If you trust those authors (some very fresh out of school) to have zero mistakes, why would you not trust the C++ STL?

steveklabnik 6y ago
In my understanding, they removed that aggressive usage, and this hasn’t been true for months.
- sk2020 6y ago
  Using the magic of Grep Occurrences of unsafe in: Actix-web: 39 A few dependencies Regex: 136 Bytes: 118 Tinyvec: 8 That’s far from exhaustive. So I wouldn’t consider this implicitly safer than any particular C++ library that has been through some basic static analysis. If anything, there probably have been way more eyes on STL. I would be even less confident in this case since the author of Actix who probably actually knew what he was doing was harassed out of his own project by the friendly community. I get the safety for performance trade off, but Rust evangelists pretend this trade off never happens, and it’s very pervasive in important libraries.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    You've now changed the goalposts from "aggressive usage" to "here's a count of a particular substring in the source code."
    - sk2020 6y ago
      I would call dozens of uses in the core and hundreds in the dependencies aggressive usage. Statically determinant memory use is the main reason we’re not taking advantage of decades of C++ development, after all.
rkangel 6y ago
I am less worried about libraries than I am about usage of them. I don't have personal knowledge of the use of unsafe in Actix-web, but yes I agree that it's not ideal and I would prefer to use an alternative. On the other hand, it is a library used by a number of projects and so security problems are more likely to be surfaced (and I get fixes for them for very little effort). I'm more concerned with how easy it is to create security holes in your application (when built in a way encouraged by the framework), and it is definitely easier in C++ than Rust.
zanellato19 6y ago
The use of unsafe on actix-web has gone down a lot and this is a thing of the past.

by sk2020 6y ago

steveklabnik 6y ago

In my understanding, they removed that aggressive usage, and this hasn’t been true for months.

sk2020 6y ago
Using the magic of Grep Occurrences of unsafe in: Actix-web: 39 A few dependencies Regex: 136 Bytes: 118 Tinyvec: 8 That’s far from exhaustive. So I wouldn’t consider this implicitly safer than any particular C++ library that has been through some basic static analysis. If anything, there probably have been way more eyes on STL. I would be even less confident in this case since the author of Actix who probably actually knew what he was doing was harassed out of his own project by the friendly community. I get the safety for performance trade off, but Rust evangelists pretend this trade off never happens, and it’s very pervasive in important libraries.
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  You've now changed the goalposts from "aggressive usage" to "here's a count of a particular substring in the source code."
  - sk2020 6y ago
    I would call dozens of uses in the core and hundreds in the dependencies aggressive usage. Statically determinant memory use is the main reason we’re not taking advantage of decades of C++ development, after all.

rkangel 6y ago

I am less worried about libraries than I am about usage of them. I don't have personal knowledge of the use of unsafe in Actix-web, but yes I agree that it's not ideal and I would prefer to use an alternative. On the other hand, it is a library used by a number of projects and so security problems are more likely to be surfaced (and I get fixes for them for very little effort). I'm more concerned with how easy it is to create security holes in your application (when built in a way encouraged by the framework), and it is definitely easier in C++ than Rust.

zanellato19 6y ago

The use of unsafe on actix-web has gone down a lot and this is a thing of the past.