4 ms·

I believe the practical difference to 100% memory safety that Rust offers in theory, or the 99% memory safety you get in practice when using unsafe, compared to

by uecker 2y ago

I believe the practical difference to 100% memory safety that Rust offers in theory, or the 99% memory safety you get in practice when using unsafe, compared to the 98% memory safety you can get today when writing decent modern C using abstractions such as string type and modern tooling is pretty irrelevant compared to all the other issues. Yes, the numbers are totally made up, but nothing I have seen so far convinces me that the reality is a lot different. Of course, there is a lot of old crappy legacy C code, and there will even be a lot of new crappy C code, but there will also be pretty bad Rust code. Now, if you like Rust, more power to you, I have no issue with people prefering Rust. But I think arguments for having to write in Rust for security reasons are mostly based on a series of fallacious arguments.

IshKebab 2y ago
> Yes, the numbers are totally made up Indeed. > but nothing I have seen so far convinces me that the reality is a lot different https://www.memorysafety.org/docs/memory-safety/#how-common-are-memory-safety-vulnerabilities https://www.memorysafety.org/docs/memory-safety/#how-common-... This is very well studied. > Of course, there is a lot of old crappy legacy C code Ahh... you don't make mistakes. I see.
- uecker 2y ago
  I don't think anything "studied" there addresses my point.
steveklabnik 2y ago
> Yes, the numbers are totally made up, but nothing I have seen so far convinces me that the reality is a lot different. This is really what a lot of all of this comes down to, Herb and the committee feel like you do, others feel that the numbers won't be that good. We'll see in time!
- IshKebab 2y ago
  > We'll see in time! If by "in time" you mean last year then yes... https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s...
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    I meant the opposite, the claim by sutter et al is that new C++ code that uses these new techniques will show the same results as this study shows for MSLs.
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      Oh I see. Yeah I agree. That's going to be a long time!

by uecker 2y ago

IshKebab 2y ago

> Yes, the numbers are totally made up Indeed. > but nothing I have seen so far convinces me that the reality is a lot different https://www.memorysafety.org/docs/memory-safety/#how-common-are-memory-safety-vulnerabilities https://www.memorysafety.org/docs/memory-safety/#how-common-... This is very well studied. > Of course, there is a lot of old crappy legacy C code Ahh... you don't make mistakes. I see.

uecker 2y ago
I don't think anything "studied" there addresses my point.

steveklabnik 2y ago

> Yes, the numbers are totally made up, but nothing I have seen so far convinces me that the reality is a lot different. This is really what a lot of all of this comes down to, Herb and the committee feel like you do, others feel that the numbers won't be that good. We'll see in time!

IshKebab 2y ago
> We'll see in time! If by "in time" you mean last year then yes... https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s...
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  I meant the opposite, the claim by sutter et al is that new C++ code that uses these new techniques will show the same results as this study shows for MSLs.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    Oh I see. Yeah I agree. That's going to be a long time!