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No such luck in having some technical discussion or at least a link to the sources. If the Rust community can be insufferable when trying to sell Rust at any a
by blub 4y ago
No such luck in having some technical discussion or at least a link to the sources.
If the Rust community can be insufferable when trying to sell Rust at any and every opportunity, Lord have mercy when they see any kind of success because the preening and puffing will have no end. This blog post will live forever in the annals of Rust.
On the other hand I’m not surprised to see that it’s written by the security team and not a development team. Same pattern as with Microsoft: security specialists tend to get obsessed by their subject matter (just like many Rust programmers), end up hating C and C++ and see them as the source of all problems (just like many Rust programmers).
In reality, C and C++ were the saviors of Android and Google reluctantly had to conjure the NDK to make up for a severe lack of performance compared to the iPhone. Note how even in the current Android they mention improving the UI performance and having less “jank”. Without C++ Android would have been DoA, but it doesn’t look like there will be a blog post thanking C++ any time soon :-)
I can’t take seriously reports about the benefits of a tool that don’t mention any of the downsides. When the devs post a blog cursing the troubles they had getting Java and C++ and Rust to work together and pitying themselves for having to read both C++ and Rust, then we’ll be getting closer to the truth.
- Ar-Curunir 4y agoYes, C++ was critical to Android in the past, when there was no memory-safe low level systems language that could provide an alternative. Now there is, so they’re using it, and finding benefits, and writing about those benefits. What should they do instead, write an eulogy to C++?
- blub 4y agoC++ is still essential for Android, but you won’t hear that from the security team bubble. They should have the dev teams write about the good, the bad and the ugly of using Rust instead of having the security team write a sanitized rainbows and sunshine story.
- insanitybit 4y agoIt's almost like us security professionals are just better developers too :O
- blub 4y agoYou guys would have almost replaced almost developers by now, if you weren’t so rare and precious :-)