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> Memory safety bugs are currently being introduced to the Linux kernel faster than they are being fixed. I don't understand where all these memory bugs are co

by hgs3 3y ago

> Memory safety bugs are currently being introduced to the Linux kernel faster than they are being fixed. I don't understand where all these memory bugs are coming from. Are programmers not testing their code? Are they not running sanitizers, fuzzers, and static analysis? Switching programming languages isn't going to fix broken development process.

charcircuit 3y ago
Memory bugs turning into compile errors will make it harder to overlook as uncompilable code is really hard to check in to most projects.
wavemode 3y ago
The entire point of Rust is that even in the most critical projects with the best tools and very experienced programmers, writing memory-safe C code in complex systems is extremely difficult. Even C++ is at least somewhat better, with smart pointers and RAII.
bjackman 3y ago
The Linux kernel development process is indeed broken. Fixing that would reduce the discrepancy between the rate of new bugs and the rate of fixes. This needs to be done, C is not going away any time soon. But while we are writing C we will be creating new bugs faster than we can fix them. We will never get 100% fuzzing coverage. Nor can sanitizers catch every bug. As you suggested though, static analysis has lots of scope for solutions. The best static analyzer around is a little thing called rustc :)
rcxdude 3y ago
the median contributor to Linux is an overworked driver developer (who may not have much software development experience at all) who is throwing stuff at the wall to try to get something to work on their machine, often with inaccurate or incomplete documentation (even or especially if they work for the company making the hardware they are writing a driver for). It's a swamp of subpar C code once you get outside the core subsystems. And yes, there are a lot of people throwing various analysis tools at the kernel to try to catch these, but the tools are quite noisy, and proper testing is hard without the relevant hardware.

by hgs3 3y ago

charcircuit 3y ago

Memory bugs turning into compile errors will make it harder to overlook as uncompilable code is really hard to check in to most projects.

wavemode 3y ago

The entire point of Rust is that even in the most critical projects with the best tools and very experienced programmers, writing memory-safe C code in complex systems is extremely difficult. Even C++ is at least somewhat better, with smart pointers and RAII.

bjackman 3y ago

The Linux kernel development process is indeed broken. Fixing that would reduce the discrepancy between the rate of new bugs and the rate of fixes. This needs to be done, C is not going away any time soon. But while we are writing C we will be creating new bugs faster than we can fix them. We will never get 100% fuzzing coverage. Nor can sanitizers catch every bug. As you suggested though, static analysis has lots of scope for solutions. The best static analyzer around is a little thing called rustc :)

rcxdude 3y ago

the median contributor to Linux is an overworked driver developer (who may not have much software development experience at all) who is throwing stuff at the wall to try to get something to work on their machine, often with inaccurate or incomplete documentation (even or especially if they work for the company making the hardware they are writing a driver for). It's a swamp of subpar C code once you get outside the core subsystems. And yes, there are a lot of people throwing various analysis tools at the kernel to try to catch these, but the tools are quite noisy, and proper testing is hard without the relevant hardware.