3 ms·

No general-purpose programming language can be "perfectly safe". At the limit, you can always write to `/proc/self/mem`, actuate a robotic arm via USB to smash

No general-purpose programming language can be "perfectly safe". At the limit, you can always write to `/proc/self/mem`, actuate a robotic arm via USB to smash the CPU, etc. A large portion of the bugs in that list require unstable language features. Most of the remainder are codegen bugs (miscompilations, ABI mismatches, linker problems, etc). The list of core type system soundness bugs is a lot shorter, it's tracked here: https://github.com/orgs/rust-lang/projects/44 https://github.com/orgs/rust-lang/projects/44

jart 3y ago
That list of core type system soundness issues is long enough that it'd probably be easier to prove Rust style checks are unsound due to incompleteness / halting problem issues rather than fixing all those issues.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  The number of GitHub issues does not correlate to the actual number or severity of issues. After all, rust-lang/rust has more than 120K issues and 9K open issues, but it doesn't mean that Rust has too many issues to solve---those GH issues are mostly means to manage tasks or user tickets to track.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  The core of the Rust safety model has been proven sound: https://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/ https://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/ If you peruse the list, all the issues are either a) places where the actual implementation falls short of the theoretical model, bit there's a plan to fix it, or b) edge-case interactions with peripheral language features (statics and dynamic dispatch).
  - int_19h 3y ago
    Statics are hardly a "peripheral language issue", though.
    - Georgelemental 3y ago
      The issue in question, https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/49206 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/49206, is such an edge case that there are 0 known examples of it causing a problem in practice, despite the issue being around for many years.

3 ms·

No general-purpose programming language can be "perfectly safe". At the limit, you can always write to `/proc/self/mem`, actuate a robotic arm via USB to smash

by Georgelemental 3y ago

jart 3y ago
That list of core type system soundness issues is long enough that it'd probably be easier to prove Rust style checks are unsound due to incompleteness / halting problem issues rather than fixing all those issues.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  The number of GitHub issues does not correlate to the actual number or severity of issues. After all, rust-lang/rust has more than 120K issues and 9K open issues, but it doesn't mean that Rust has too many issues to solve---those GH issues are mostly means to manage tasks or user tickets to track.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  The core of the Rust safety model has been proven sound: https://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/ https://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/ If you peruse the list, all the issues are either a) places where the actual implementation falls short of the theoretical model, bit there's a plan to fix it, or b) edge-case interactions with peripheral language features (statics and dynamic dispatch).
  - int_19h 3y ago
    Statics are hardly a "peripheral language issue", though.
    - Georgelemental 3y ago
      The issue in question, https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/49206 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/49206, is such an edge case that there are 0 known examples of it causing a problem in practice, despite the issue being around for many years.