4 ms·

What is "big macro"?

3836293648 3y ago
Big Pharma but about macros in Rust. This post is a response to the third link
Ygg2 3y ago
Theory that David Tolnay added precompiled serde macros to start a RFC process to add precompiled macros to cargo. Originally the conspiracy was to move Rust towards Bazel/Buck. Part of this theory was that he sabotaged thePHD dev's talk in order to force community to rely on his crates `syn`, `quote`, etc. Rather than using Rust to maintain guarantees. I mean who doesn't like working (mostly) unpaid for open source community in order to maintain Clout™?
- epage 3y ago
  > Originally the conspiracy was to move Rust towards Bazel/Buck. Never saw this part of the conversation and hope no one took my words to mean I felt that. I only expressed regret that he (a Project member and maintainer of one of the more critical packages) gave up on cargo wich I surmised by him saying that he did work for buck/bazel but didn't do anything for cargo but dumped the binary on us.
  - Ygg2 3y ago
    You might not have meant it, but people on Reddit/Discord, in a dysmal show of game of telephones thought it was a credible theory.
    - epage 3y ago
      Huh, somehow I missed that bit on reddit. As for Discord, I tend to keep my interactions there to a minimum, so not suprised that I missed that.
- lexlash 3y ago
  I don’t think it’s a theory. He certainly tried to use the precompiled macros in service of this pre-RFC: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-sandboxed-deterministic-reproducible-efficient-wasm-compilation-of-proc-macros/19359 https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-sandboxed-determin... Relevant section: "Someone else is always auditing the code and will save me from anything bad in a macro before it would ever run on my machines." (At one point serde_derive ran an untrusted binary for over 4 weeks across 12 releases before almost anyone became aware. This was plain-as-day code in the crate root; I am confident that professionally obfuscated malicious code would be undetected for years.)
  - nextaccountic 3y ago
    > I am confident that professionally obfuscated malicious code would be undetected for years There was even a contest for underhanded code (malicious code that, if found, someone could plausibly claim that it was just a honest programmer mistake rather than intentional malware), it was pretty cool https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/72v194/the_2016_underhanded_rust_contest_the_results/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/72v194/the_2016_under... And there were talks to revive it https://github.com/rust-community/team/issues/256 https://github.com/rust-community/team/issues/256
epage 3y ago
To summarize the post, people quickly latched onto the idea that David was trying to sabbotage introspection to protect his empire of Rust packages which are critical to the use of macros (syn, proc-macro2) and heavy users (serde).
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Geez Reason 214 for not having macros in your language: reduce drama
  - Ygg2 3y ago
    To be fair, this is one part where I don't think macros caused the drama. Not sure why, but broader Rust community really loves participating in drama, and seems incapable of applying the modicum of Hanlon's Razor.
    - epage 3y ago
      > Not sure why, but broader Rust community really loves participating in drama, and seems incapable of applying the modicum of Hanlon's Razor. This has been my frustration with it all. I quickly saw how this whole thing could have happened in a purely innocent way, not to dismiss other explanations but to see that multiple narratives could exist beside the one the mob was currently latched on to.

Big Pharma but about macros in Rust. This post is a response to the third link

Ygg2 3y ago

Theory that David Tolnay added precompiled serde macros to start a RFC process to add precompiled macros to cargo. Originally the conspiracy was to move Rust towards Bazel/Buck. Part of this theory was that he sabotaged thePHD dev's talk in order to force community to rely on his crates `syn`, `quote`, etc. Rather than using Rust to maintain guarantees. I mean who doesn't like working (mostly) unpaid for open source community in order to maintain Clout™?

epage 3y ago
> Originally the conspiracy was to move Rust towards Bazel/Buck. Never saw this part of the conversation and hope no one took my words to mean I felt that. I only expressed regret that he (a Project member and maintainer of one of the more critical packages) gave up on cargo wich I surmised by him saying that he did work for buck/bazel but didn't do anything for cargo but dumped the binary on us.
- Ygg2 3y ago
  You might not have meant it, but people on Reddit/Discord, in a dysmal show of game of telephones thought it was a credible theory.
  - epage 3y ago
    Huh, somehow I missed that bit on reddit. As for Discord, I tend to keep my interactions there to a minimum, so not suprised that I missed that.
lexlash 3y ago
I don’t think it’s a theory. He certainly tried to use the precompiled macros in service of this pre-RFC: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-sandboxed-deterministic-reproducible-efficient-wasm-compilation-of-proc-macros/19359 https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-sandboxed-determin... Relevant section: "Someone else is always auditing the code and will save me from anything bad in a macro before it would ever run on my machines." (At one point serde_derive ran an untrusted binary for over 4 weeks across 12 releases before almost anyone became aware. This was plain-as-day code in the crate root; I am confident that professionally obfuscated malicious code would be undetected for years.)
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  > I am confident that professionally obfuscated malicious code would be undetected for years There was even a contest for underhanded code (malicious code that, if found, someone could plausibly claim that it was just a honest programmer mistake rather than intentional malware), it was pretty cool https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/72v194/the_2016_underhanded_rust_contest_the_results/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/72v194/the_2016_under... And there were talks to revive it https://github.com/rust-community/team/issues/256 https://github.com/rust-community/team/issues/256

epage 3y ago

To summarize the post, people quickly latched onto the idea that David was trying to sabbotage introspection to protect his empire of Rust packages which are critical to the use of macros (syn, proc-macro2) and heavy users (serde).

raverbashing 3y ago
Geez Reason 214 for not having macros in your language: reduce drama
- Ygg2 3y ago
  To be fair, this is one part where I don't think macros caused the drama. Not sure why, but broader Rust community really loves participating in drama, and seems incapable of applying the modicum of Hanlon's Razor.
  - epage 3y ago
    > Not sure why, but broader Rust community really loves participating in drama, and seems incapable of applying the modicum of Hanlon's Razor. This has been my frustration with it all. I quickly saw how this whole thing could have happened in a purely innocent way, not to dismiss other explanations but to see that multiple narratives could exist beside the one the mob was currently latched on to.