4 ms·

The quoted paragraph has nothing to do with language choice.

bee_rider 4y ago
They didn’t write in paragraphs, it is more like a collection of IRC posts or something. Here’s the whole post thingy: > God I wish they did. They wrote the program in C, (as far as I can tell) have no intention of rewriting it in Rust, and it's had many viable attacks over the years that allowed attackers to gain root privileges and worse. It's also debatable if the entire concept of privilege separation as implemented in Linux and UNIX was a bad idea to begin with but we're stuck with it because of an endless ball of legacy programs controlled by egotistical open source people that refuse to change because then obscure targets that nobody uses won't be able to leech off of the rest of the ecosystem by holding back any chance to let us have a modicum of nice things. So, I guess fair enough. I will expand it slightly to say: it is an uncharitable way of describing volunteers who don’t feel like learning a new language and reimplementing their old projects while also overturning a huge ecosystem of software.
- chaxor 4y ago
  It's obviously a (failed) attempt to be funny by being very sarcastic. No one is stupid enough to this that writing it in Rust was even an option in the days unix was written - especially considering the types of people that would know how to write C and Rust for kernels.
  - 59nadir 4y ago
    They do believe it should be rewritten in Rust: > The part about being annoyed that sudo is still written in C is coming from a sense of exasperation that there's still more predictable memory safety bugs involved with sudo because it's still written in C.
mid-kid 4y ago
The paragraph quoted is about the language choice, too, just that part was snipped off because it's long. It's one ball of a paragraph that goes in all directions, citing debian and gentoo's troubles with rust support[1] and calling them leeches for wanting to support obscure architectures. Not a fun read. [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/845535/ https://lwn.net/Articles/845535/

They didn’t write in paragraphs, it is more like a collection of IRC posts or something. Here’s the whole post thingy: > God I wish they did. They wrote the program in C, (as far as I can tell) have no intention of rewriting it in Rust, and it's had many viable attacks over the years that allowed attackers to gain root privileges and worse. It's also debatable if the entire concept of privilege separation as implemented in Linux and UNIX was a bad idea to begin with but we're stuck with it because of an endless ball of legacy programs controlled by egotistical open source people that refuse to change because then obscure targets that nobody uses won't be able to leech off of the rest of the ecosystem by holding back any chance to let us have a modicum of nice things. So, I guess fair enough. I will expand it slightly to say: it is an uncharitable way of describing volunteers who don’t feel like learning a new language and reimplementing their old projects while also overturning a huge ecosystem of software.

chaxor 4y ago
It's obviously a (failed) attempt to be funny by being very sarcastic. No one is stupid enough to this that writing it in Rust was even an option in the days unix was written - especially considering the types of people that would know how to write C and Rust for kernels.
- 59nadir 4y ago
  They do believe it should be rewritten in Rust: > The part about being annoyed that sudo is still written in C is coming from a sense of exasperation that there's still more predictable memory safety bugs involved with sudo because it's still written in C.

mid-kid 4y ago

The paragraph quoted is about the language choice, too, just that part was snipped off because it's long. It's one ball of a paragraph that goes in all directions, citing debian and gentoo's troubles with rust support[1] and calling them leeches for wanting to support obscure architectures. Not a fun read. [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/845535/ https://lwn.net/Articles/845535/