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The project had had a string of governance issues recently. The old leadership structure fell apart (2 years ago) due to irreconcilable disagreements. Then the

The project had had a string of governance issues recently. The old leadership structure fell apart (2 years ago) due to irreconcilable disagreements. Then the informal temporary replacement governance, due to a sequence of miscommunications and process failures, committed a major slight against a prominent C community member who had been scheduled to speak at a Rust conference (1 week ago). Said temporary governance system is currently (as in, should be done in 1-2 days max) being replaced by the new permanent governance council, which will hopefully improve things. In any case, Rust is unlikely to fail because it is the only viable option in its niche (safe systems programming language that can replace C++ everywhere), and has gotten a large amount of investment from major corporations.

hudon 3y ago
I wouldn't say it definitely owns that niche, yet, until there is empirical evidence of how using Rust correlates to safer software. Until then, I think it's a hope founded on a substantive argument (ie. the borrow checker) that is still at risk of not achieving its goals.
- aw1621107 3y ago
  The Android team posted something on that topic about 6 months ago [0, HN discussion at 1]. One potentially relevant highlight: > To date, there have been zero memory safety vulnerabilities discovered in Android’s Rust code. > Historical vulnerability density is greater than 1/kLOC (1 vulnerability per thousand lines of code) in many of Android’s C/C++ components (e.g. media, Bluetooth, NFC, etc). Based on this historical vulnerability density, it’s likely that using Rust has already prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from reaching production. The post has more details, and I think the entire thing is worth a read. [0]: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-languages-in-android-13.html https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33819616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33819616

hudon 3y ago

I wouldn't say it definitely owns that niche, yet, until there is empirical evidence of how using Rust correlates to safer software. Until then, I think it's a hope founded on a substantive argument (ie. the borrow checker) that is still at risk of not achieving its goals.

aw1621107 3y ago
The Android team posted something on that topic about 6 months ago [0, HN discussion at 1]. One potentially relevant highlight: > To date, there have been zero memory safety vulnerabilities discovered in Android’s Rust code. > Historical vulnerability density is greater than 1/kLOC (1 vulnerability per thousand lines of code) in many of Android’s C/C++ components (e.g. media, Bluetooth, NFC, etc). Based on this historical vulnerability density, it’s likely that using Rust has already prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from reaching production. The post has more details, and I think the entire thing is worth a read. [0]: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-languages-in-android-13.html https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33819616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33819616