4 ms·

All I keep seeing, is how rust is perfect for everything, will fix everything, should be everywhere, etc, etc. There's gotta be a profit motive involved. The

All I keep seeing, is how rust is perfect for everything, will fix everything, should be everywhere, etc, etc. There's gotta be a profit motive involved. There must.

geofft 5y ago
There is absolutely a profit motive involved! The less time you spend dealing with segfaults and inexplicable double-frees because you have no idea where the first free is, the more time you can spend working on features that impact the business's bottom line. The fewer emergency patches you have to deploy, the more uptime you have and the less you spend on the required ops work. The fewer zero-days you suffer, the fewer existential threats to your business. And so forth. None of this would be happening if the market didn't care. I was one of the people who started the Linux kernel modules in Rust project (I'm credited in the announcement), but I started it because I thought it would be fun, and I have a day job that isn't related to Rust at all. So I've spent almost no time on it recently. The corporate sponsors behind this effort are interested in this because they use Linux (and curl and so forth) at a large enough scale where this sort of thing matters. I would guess that, for instance, Google cares about getting Rust into Android's kernel because they want to credibly claim that Android has fewer zero-days than iOS, and they have a clear public agenda of wanting to get rid of zero-days (see e.g. https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/p/0day.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/p/0day.html). So that's their profit motive, and I'm very happy it exists, because this work is too important to rely on the free time of people like me. (To be abundantly clear: I am not paid by any of the involved organizations, and I had no advance knowledge of this before the public announcement.)
- pjmlp 5y ago
  > Google cares about getting Rust into Android's kernel because they want to credibly claim that Android has fewer zero-days than iOS, and they have a clear public agenda of wanting to get rid of zero-days It is going to be very hard to achieve this when iOS is moving into the direction to have 100% of userspace API available to Swift, while Android team forces us to use C and C++ for anything related with real time audio, machine learning and 3D API. Now in Android 12 even Renderscript was replaced with C and C++ alongside Vulkan compute shaders. The kernel can even be 100% Rust, it won't help those of us that are cloning Oboe or Vulkan github repo, dealing with JNI boilerplate, C and C++ toolchain issues on NDK.
grumblenum 5y ago
Well, Google probably doesn’t control all the C++ standards committees. I don’t know how much control they have over commit rights to the Rust compiler. Given Mozilla’s client-patron relationship with Google, then I’d guess it’s possible. But, yeah, a company whose business model is tricking old people into buying junk and surveilling their users probably shouldn’t be implicitly trusted.
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  Google, nor Mozilla, controls who has commit rights to the Rust compiler.
  - grumblenum 5y ago
    They just employ the people who do? And, until recently, the paid language evangelists?
    - steveklabnik 5y ago
      Google employs a few people who have a commit bit, but they are handed out via consensus among the whole team, not by a single company or its employees.
      - grumblenum 5y ago
        Right, and at one point the whole team were all or mostly Mozilla employees (which, financially, is a client company of Google). So the core team is a group of Mozilla alumni and their friends. Unlike, say, C++ which is under diverse committees across multiple countries.

All I keep seeing, is how rust is perfect for everything, will fix everything, should be everywhere, etc, etc. There's gotta be a profit motive involved. There must.

geofft 5y ago

There is absolutely a profit motive involved! The less time you spend dealing with segfaults and inexplicable double-frees because you have no idea where the first free is, the more time you can spend working on features that impact the business's bottom line. The fewer emergency patches you have to deploy, the more uptime you have and the less you spend on the required ops work. The fewer zero-days you suffer, the fewer existential threats to your business. And so forth. None of this would be happening if the market didn't care. I was one of the people who started the Linux kernel modules in Rust project (I'm credited in the announcement), but I started it because I thought it would be fun, and I have a day job that isn't related to Rust at all. So I've spent almost no time on it recently. The corporate sponsors behind this effort are interested in this because they use Linux (and curl and so forth) at a large enough scale where this sort of thing matters. I would guess that, for instance, Google cares about getting Rust into Android's kernel because they want to credibly claim that Android has fewer zero-days than iOS, and they have a clear public agenda of wanting to get rid of zero-days (see e.g. https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/p/0day.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/p/0day.html). So that's their profit motive, and I'm very happy it exists, because this work is too important to rely on the free time of people like me. (To be abundantly clear: I am not paid by any of the involved organizations, and I had no advance knowledge of this before the public announcement.)

pjmlp 5y ago
> Google cares about getting Rust into Android's kernel because they want to credibly claim that Android has fewer zero-days than iOS, and they have a clear public agenda of wanting to get rid of zero-days It is going to be very hard to achieve this when iOS is moving into the direction to have 100% of userspace API available to Swift, while Android team forces us to use C and C++ for anything related with real time audio, machine learning and 3D API. Now in Android 12 even Renderscript was replaced with C and C++ alongside Vulkan compute shaders. The kernel can even be 100% Rust, it won't help those of us that are cloning Oboe or Vulkan github repo, dealing with JNI boilerplate, C and C++ toolchain issues on NDK.

grumblenum 5y ago

Well, Google probably doesn’t control all the C++ standards committees. I don’t know how much control they have over commit rights to the Rust compiler. Given Mozilla’s client-patron relationship with Google, then I’d guess it’s possible. But, yeah, a company whose business model is tricking old people into buying junk and surveilling their users probably shouldn’t be implicitly trusted.

steveklabnik 5y ago
Google, nor Mozilla, controls who has commit rights to the Rust compiler.
- grumblenum 5y ago
  They just employ the people who do? And, until recently, the paid language evangelists?
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    Google employs a few people who have a commit bit, but they are handed out via consensus among the whole team, not by a single company or its employees.
    - grumblenum 5y ago
      Right, and at one point the whole team were all or mostly Mozilla employees (which, financially, is a client company of Google). So the core team is a group of Mozilla alumni and their friends. Unlike, say, C++ which is under diverse committees across multiple countries.