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> IMHO the probability is a little less. Exactly, Rust simply eliminates a certain class of bugs. You can still make some really major mistakes in the absence

> IMHO the probability is a little less. Exactly, Rust simply eliminates a certain class of bugs. You can still make some really major mistakes in the absence of these bugs, e.g. "goto fail" could have easily been written in Rust.

ordiel 5y ago
Most certainly opening the door to a diffetent kind of bugs. This mentally of tying bugs to a language demonstrates a very poor understanding of the issues themselves, and if anything a large impacting bug demonstrates wide adoption of an individual piece, most probably choosen due to its stability or ease of use. Remember heartbleed?...
- staticassertion 5y ago
  > Most certainly opening the door to a diffetent kind of bugs. No? There's no law of conservation of bug class or something, you can eliminate bug classes without introducing a new one. > This mentally of tying bugs to a language demonstrates a very poor understanding of the issues themselves, No it doesn't. > and if anything a large impacting bug demonstrates wide adoption of an individual piece, most probably choosen due to its stability or ease of use. I don't think this has held true historically, and log4j is a good example of this (though there are many others). > Remember heartbleed?... A weird point to bring up since heartbleed was an out of bounds memory read.
vlmutolo 5y ago
The "goto fail" bug isn't a great example; Rust actually does specifically guard against this by requiring curly braces around the body of "if". Here's an explanation of "goto fail", which includes a code snippet. https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/02/24/anatomy-of-a-goto-fail-apples-ssl-bug-explained-plus-an-unofficial-patch/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/02/24/anatomy-of-a-got... If C conditionals required explicit braces around the body, the second fail would have been redundant code instead of a security vulnerability. Additonally, Rust will warn you if you have "unreachable" code, such as all the code after the unconditional "goto fail". Though, I'm sure modern C compilers would also warn about this. All that said, Rust definitely does have plenty of bug classes left for people to trip over. Integer under/overflows come to mind (though they're just logic errors instead of undefined behavior).
- tialaramex 5y ago
  In the same class as the integer over/underflows, Rust also doesn't warn for throwing away information when casting. So (my_value as u16) might be a completely safe transformation from an unsigned one byte my_value to a u16, but it might be throwing away the top 16-bits of a 32-bit value and Rust doesn't think that's worth any additional caution. Rust also hasn't boarded the "People can't remember precedence rules" train like some modern languages. It has fewer operators with unnecessary values, reducing some opportunities for mistakes like C's increment footgun, but it does still have precedence and so you can still forget the precedence rules which the compiler is going to apply to your code. But there are a lot of things Rust does catch, and there are even more things that aren't caught by Rust the language per se but are caught in idiomatic Rust because the language affords better ways to do things. Locking is an example, idiomatic Rust locking means you can't make the lock A but change B mistake seen so often in real bugs, because idiomatic use of Rust's type system would put the variable B inside the lock for B, if you didn't take the lock you don't have the variable to change it. https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.Mutex.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.Mutex.html
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Another example would be bounds checking, yes it is much better than silenty corrupting memory, but dying with a panic might not be the best solution in some cases, specially if the application is controlling hardware. Not only Rust, this applies to all safe languages, just crashing also opens the door to exploits and denial attacks.
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      If the bounds check fails at compile time then the program doesn't compile. This seems like it should be a reasonable ask for any programming language, but, apparently not. And it probably applies to all general purpose languages but of course it doesn't apply to all the safe languages that aren't general purpose. You can't have bounds misses in WUFFS. When you try to touch array[x] in WUFFS, the compiler constrains the type of x to have a boundary limit according to the size of the array, reasoning that you can't very well have meant for it to be possible to overstep the bounds of the array at runtime. Trivial arithmetic mistakes you might find in unit testing or worse production with other languages are often compile time errors in WUFFS as a result.

ordiel 5y ago

Most certainly opening the door to a diffetent kind of bugs. This mentally of tying bugs to a language demonstrates a very poor understanding of the issues themselves, and if anything a large impacting bug demonstrates wide adoption of an individual piece, most probably choosen due to its stability or ease of use. Remember heartbleed?...

staticassertion 5y ago
> Most certainly opening the door to a diffetent kind of bugs. No? There's no law of conservation of bug class or something, you can eliminate bug classes without introducing a new one. > This mentally of tying bugs to a language demonstrates a very poor understanding of the issues themselves, No it doesn't. > and if anything a large impacting bug demonstrates wide adoption of an individual piece, most probably choosen due to its stability or ease of use. I don't think this has held true historically, and log4j is a good example of this (though there are many others). > Remember heartbleed?... A weird point to bring up since heartbleed was an out of bounds memory read.

vlmutolo 5y ago

The "goto fail" bug isn't a great example; Rust actually does specifically guard against this by requiring curly braces around the body of "if". Here's an explanation of "goto fail", which includes a code snippet. https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/02/24/anatomy-of-a-goto-fail-apples-ssl-bug-explained-plus-an-unofficial-patch/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/02/24/anatomy-of-a-got... If C conditionals required explicit braces around the body, the second fail would have been redundant code instead of a security vulnerability. Additonally, Rust will warn you if you have "unreachable" code, such as all the code after the unconditional "goto fail". Though, I'm sure modern C compilers would also warn about this. All that said, Rust definitely does have plenty of bug classes left for people to trip over. Integer under/overflows come to mind (though they're just logic errors instead of undefined behavior).

tialaramex 5y ago
In the same class as the integer over/underflows, Rust also doesn't warn for throwing away information when casting. So (my_value as u16) might be a completely safe transformation from an unsigned one byte my_value to a u16, but it might be throwing away the top 16-bits of a 32-bit value and Rust doesn't think that's worth any additional caution. Rust also hasn't boarded the "People can't remember precedence rules" train like some modern languages. It has fewer operators with unnecessary values, reducing some opportunities for mistakes like C's increment footgun, but it does still have precedence and so you can still forget the precedence rules which the compiler is going to apply to your code. But there are a lot of things Rust does catch, and there are even more things that aren't caught by Rust the language per se but are caught in idiomatic Rust because the language affords better ways to do things. Locking is an example, idiomatic Rust locking means you can't make the lock A but change B mistake seen so often in real bugs, because idiomatic use of Rust's type system would put the variable B inside the lock for B, if you didn't take the lock you don't have the variable to change it. https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.Mutex.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.Mutex.html
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Another example would be bounds checking, yes it is much better than silenty corrupting memory, but dying with a panic might not be the best solution in some cases, specially if the application is controlling hardware. Not only Rust, this applies to all safe languages, just crashing also opens the door to exploits and denial attacks.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    If the bounds check fails at compile time then the program doesn't compile. This seems like it should be a reasonable ask for any programming language, but, apparently not. And it probably applies to all general purpose languages but of course it doesn't apply to all the safe languages that aren't general purpose. You can't have bounds misses in WUFFS. When you try to touch array[x] in WUFFS, the compiler constrains the type of x to have a boundary limit according to the size of the array, reasoning that you can't very well have meant for it to be possible to overstep the bounds of the array at runtime. Trivial arithmetic mistakes you might find in unit testing or worse production with other languages are often compile time errors in WUFFS as a result.