3 ms·

A bit surprised that it’s written in rust, rather than Go. I suppose rust can take advantage of more low level apis, plus no overhead of garbage collection. ed

by xyst 2y ago

A bit surprised that it’s written in rust, rather than Go. I suppose rust can take advantage of more low level apis, plus no overhead of garbage collection. edit: love that the community is not silo’d into a proprietary chat platform as well: > We welcome contributors! To join our community, we recommend joining the mailing list. - https://github.com/project-oak/oak?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-involved https://github.com/project-oak/oak?tab=readme-ov-file#gettin... I really wish more open source projects used mailing lists. 1) decentralized means of communication 2) able to join these communities from any type of environment (ie, corporate hell hole) without much friction. With discord, slack (especially at fortune 500s). It usually involved a whole process of approvals to get the damn thing installed and punch a hole through the firewall to get access to the service. No, using a personal email and device for what I consider contributing from a work aspect (ie, submitting patch to OSS to solve specific problem with project) is not acceptable.

jb1991 2y ago
> A bit surprised that it’s written in rust, rather than Go. I suppose rust can take advantage of more low level apis, plus no overhead of garbage collection. It’s security-focused technology. Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area.
- filleokus 2y ago
  > Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area. Could you name some advantages? I would agree Rust has huge advantages compared to C/C++, and Rust also has a much bigger presence in the "security space". But I would say that's more because of Rust's lack of GC, smaller footprint which works in embedded systems etc. I guess you could say that Rust's type system being more expressive might eliminate certain classes of bugs, which have security implications. But "huge advantages"? (Honestly I'm not flame baiting, I'm genuinely curious if my worldview is wrong)
  - Ygg2 2y ago
    > But "huge advantages"? They don't call null/nil the billion dollar mistake for nothing.
  - Myrmornis 2y ago
    I think lack of union/sum types, i.e. lack of compiler exhaustivity checks on cases is pretty relevant here. For security applications the goal is maximum stringency w.r.t. correctness so I think “huge advantage “ isn’t an exaggeration regarding sum types. It’s not like “have you checked all cases” is an unimportant question when trying to prove correctness.
- dijit 2y ago
  does it really? aside from a handful of crates and the default std hashmap i being slow but cryptographically sound: I would not have assumed so. Go usage inside Google is actually quite low, people talk a lot about Go being a google project but in reality its a project made by some people who work at Google. When I last checked it was a bronze supported language (with C++, Python and Java being Gold).
  - ycombinatrix 2y ago
    Python has first class support at Google? Didn't they just fire their entire Python team?
    - sulam 2y ago
      Roughly, yes, but they didn’t stop doing the work. It was moved to another set of people.
- deskr 2y ago
  What advantages are those?
  - morning-coffee 2y ago
    Rust's compiler can prevent data races, for example. (It forbids mutation in the presence of aliasing, which is the root of it.)
    - dijit 2y ago
      should be mentioned that Go has optional flags already built in to the compiler for detection of data races.
      - ycombinatrix 2y ago
        should we also mention that C has optional tooling for memory safety?
      - jb1991 2y ago
        the race detector ( -race ) only detects races that actually occur. If they don't happen, then it doesn't detect them.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
summerlight 2y ago
I think using Go is not a popular decision in the Android ecosystem, especially for those system programming stuffs. It's very likely that the project needs tight client side integration, so they probably wanted to use a language which has a wider support especially in the case of possible iOS support.
topspin 2y ago
The hardware features used for this are Intel and AMD CPU extensions: they're writing a microvm to run inside special "enclave" virtual machines. Go is a fine language but it's not really intended for this sort of work. Rust is a natural fit for this work: you can write low level drivers and also ensure a number of safety properties.

by xyst 2y ago

jb1991 2y ago

> A bit surprised that it’s written in rust, rather than Go. I suppose rust can take advantage of more low level apis, plus no overhead of garbage collection. It’s security-focused technology. Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area.

filleokus 2y ago
> Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area. Could you name some advantages? I would agree Rust has huge advantages compared to C/C++, and Rust also has a much bigger presence in the "security space". But I would say that's more because of Rust's lack of GC, smaller footprint which works in embedded systems etc. I guess you could say that Rust's type system being more expressive might eliminate certain classes of bugs, which have security implications. But "huge advantages"? (Honestly I'm not flame baiting, I'm genuinely curious if my worldview is wrong)
- Ygg2 2y ago
  > But "huge advantages"? They don't call null/nil the billion dollar mistake for nothing.
- Myrmornis 2y ago
  I think lack of union/sum types, i.e. lack of compiler exhaustivity checks on cases is pretty relevant here. For security applications the goal is maximum stringency w.r.t. correctness so I think “huge advantage “ isn’t an exaggeration regarding sum types. It’s not like “have you checked all cases” is an unimportant question when trying to prove correctness.
dijit 2y ago
does it really? aside from a handful of crates and the default std hashmap i being slow but cryptographically sound: I would not have assumed so. Go usage inside Google is actually quite low, people talk a lot about Go being a google project but in reality its a project made by some people who work at Google. When I last checked it was a bronze supported language (with C++, Python and Java being Gold).
- ycombinatrix 2y ago
  Python has first class support at Google? Didn't they just fire their entire Python team?
  - sulam 2y ago
    Roughly, yes, but they didn’t stop doing the work. It was moved to another set of people.
deskr 2y ago
What advantages are those?
- morning-coffee 2y ago
  Rust's compiler can prevent data races, for example. (It forbids mutation in the presence of aliasing, which is the root of it.)
  - dijit 2y ago
    should be mentioned that Go has optional flags already built in to the compiler for detection of data races.
    - ycombinatrix 2y ago
      should we also mention that C has optional tooling for memory safety?
    - jb1991 2y ago
      the race detector ( -race ) only detects races that actually occur. If they don't happen, then it doesn't detect them.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

summerlight 2y ago

I think using Go is not a popular decision in the Android ecosystem, especially for those system programming stuffs. It's very likely that the project needs tight client side integration, so they probably wanted to use a language which has a wider support especially in the case of possible iOS support.

topspin 2y ago

The hardware features used for this are Intel and AMD CPU extensions: they're writing a microvm to run inside special "enclave" virtual machines. Go is a fine language but it's not really intended for this sort of work. Rust is a natural fit for this work: you can write low level drivers and also ensure a number of safety properties.