3 ms·

I did not mean that the RCE of log4j is a memory safety issue, its just that, I would prefer to choose something where the probability of me having to wake up a

by mfrw 5y ago

I did not mean that the RCE of log4j is a memory safety issue, its just that, I would prefer to choose something where the probability of me having to wake up at the middle of the night and fix is less. Honestly, I would care less if it were memory safety or whatever, given I had to wake up at midnight :)

johnisgood 5y ago
Just because it is written in Rust, it does not mean that you will have less bugs or whatever to fix. I could easily say that if it is written in Ada or Nim, then you will have way less bugs, as those languages are way easier to understand, and they are safe & fast & easy. Nim is just as easy as Python, and it is safe if you want it to.
- mfrw 5y ago
  I completely agree. My choice of words was not not right.
- moonchrome 5y ago
  >it does not mean that you will have less bugs or whatever to fix But it does since you eliminate an entire class of bugs, and a class that's generally the source of most exploits out there (eg. heartbleed comes to mind as a similar level of exploit but was a result of memory errors). JVM does the same with GC, and so do a lot of other languages, but when it comes to rewriting non-managed code Rust is a great choice over C in my book, I would feel better about introducing a Rust dependency over a C/C++ dependency just based on that. As for ADA and Nim, if it's some black box docker service then sure, otherwise if I have to include it in my build pipeline that's a hard pass.
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    > But it does since you eliminate an entire class of bugs As opposed to what language? C? x86 assembly? You may be right, but I was using Ada and Nim as an example, not C. I could have used D as well. Again, the fact that it is written in Rust and not Ada, Nim, or D does not mean that it has less bugs. In fact, I would even argue that even if we do a C vs. Rust, it still does not follow that just because it is written in Rust and not C, it has less bugs. There are all sorts of other bugs that could outnumber the memory-related bugs you may have in C. Can you really not see this possibility?
    - moonchrome 5y ago
      >As opposed to what language? C? x86 assembly? You may be right, but I was using Ada and Nim as an example, not C. I could have used D as well. Again, the fact that it is written in Rust and not Ada, Nim, or D does not mean that it has less bugs. Yes, C, the language memcached is written in. The fact that it's written in Rust means that it's more likely to work in the first place because more people are actually using that language in the real world vs. Ada, Nim and D. >In fact, I would even argue that even if we do a C vs. Rust, it still does not follow that just because it is written in Rust and not C, it has less bugs. There are all sorts of other bugs that could outnumber the memory-related bugs you may have in C. Can you really not see this possibility? I don't feel like just random googling for the sake of argument - it should be easy to find, there have been many analysis of this kind and pretty much any I've seen concludes the largest source of vulnerabilities have been memory errors (I remember FF, Linux, Microsoft, etc.). So yeah if you want to be pedantic for the sake of argument feel free to keep arguing about the semantics - real world experience motivated initial Rust development and it's gaining adoption in places like cloud provider infrastructure and drivers because people dealing with these issues know what their most common bugs are coming from.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]

by mfrw 5y ago

johnisgood 5y ago

Just because it is written in Rust, it does not mean that you will have less bugs or whatever to fix. I could easily say that if it is written in Ada or Nim, then you will have way less bugs, as those languages are way easier to understand, and they are safe & fast & easy. Nim is just as easy as Python, and it is safe if you want it to.

mfrw 5y ago
I completely agree. My choice of words was not not right.
moonchrome 5y ago
>it does not mean that you will have less bugs or whatever to fix But it does since you eliminate an entire class of bugs, and a class that's generally the source of most exploits out there (eg. heartbleed comes to mind as a similar level of exploit but was a result of memory errors). JVM does the same with GC, and so do a lot of other languages, but when it comes to rewriting non-managed code Rust is a great choice over C in my book, I would feel better about introducing a Rust dependency over a C/C++ dependency just based on that. As for ADA and Nim, if it's some black box docker service then sure, otherwise if I have to include it in my build pipeline that's a hard pass.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  > But it does since you eliminate an entire class of bugs As opposed to what language? C? x86 assembly? You may be right, but I was using Ada and Nim as an example, not C. I could have used D as well. Again, the fact that it is written in Rust and not Ada, Nim, or D does not mean that it has less bugs. In fact, I would even argue that even if we do a C vs. Rust, it still does not follow that just because it is written in Rust and not C, it has less bugs. There are all sorts of other bugs that could outnumber the memory-related bugs you may have in C. Can you really not see this possibility?
  - moonchrome 5y ago
    >As opposed to what language? C? x86 assembly? You may be right, but I was using Ada and Nim as an example, not C. I could have used D as well. Again, the fact that it is written in Rust and not Ada, Nim, or D does not mean that it has less bugs. Yes, C, the language memcached is written in. The fact that it's written in Rust means that it's more likely to work in the first place because more people are actually using that language in the real world vs. Ada, Nim and D. >In fact, I would even argue that even if we do a C vs. Rust, it still does not follow that just because it is written in Rust and not C, it has less bugs. There are all sorts of other bugs that could outnumber the memory-related bugs you may have in C. Can you really not see this possibility? I don't feel like just random googling for the sake of argument - it should be easy to find, there have been many analysis of this kind and pretty much any I've seen concludes the largest source of vulnerabilities have been memory errors (I remember FF, Linux, Microsoft, etc.). So yeah if you want to be pedantic for the sake of argument feel free to keep arguing about the semantics - real world experience motivated initial Rust development and it's gaining adoption in places like cloud provider infrastructure and drivers because people dealing with these issues know what their most common bugs are coming from.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]