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I do not think it is weird. Every C bug was taken as clear evidence that we need to abandon C and switch to Rust. So the fact that there are also such bugs in

by uecker 10mo ago

I do not think it is weird. Every C bug was taken as clear evidence that we need to abandon C and switch to Rust. So the fact that there are also such bugs in Rust is - while obvious - also important to highlight. So it is not weird hatred against Rust, but hatred against bullshit. And considering that most of the code is C, your 150 C vulnerabilities is a meaningless number, so you still continue with this nonsense.

aw1621107 10mo ago
> Every C bug was taken as clear evidence that we need to abandon C and switch to Rust. I think more charitably it's every "simple" C bug that tends to provoke that reaction. Buffer overflows, use-after-frees, things for which mechanically-enforceable solutions have existed and been widespread for a while. I think more exotic bugs tend to produce more interesting discussions since the techniques for avoiding those bugs tend to be similarly exotic. > So the fact that there are also such bugs in Rust Similarly, I think you need to be careful about what exactly "such bugs" encompasses. This bug wasn't one of the above "simple" bugs IMHO, so I would guess an equivalent bug in C code would at least avoid the worst of the more strident calls you so dislike. Hard to say for sure, though, given our unfortunate lack of a time machine.
- uecker 10mo ago
  I agree with you that this is more nuanced and that I oversimplified this a bit in my comment.
bitwize 10mo ago
Safe Rust eliminates some of the more common memory bugs in C. The bug under discussion was written in unsafe Rust—but even that doesn't obviate the huge advantages Rust has over C. Even unsafe Rust, for instance, has far fewer UB gotchas than C. And with Rust, you can isolate the tricky bits in 'unsafe' blocks and write higher-level logic in safe Rust, giving your code an extra layer of protection. C is 100% unsafe—"unsafe at any speed" as I like to say.
- noosphr 10mo ago
  The safest computer is a rock. The point is that when you start using rust in the real world to get real work done a lot of the promises that were made about safety have to be dropped because you need to boot your computer before the heat death of the universe. The result will be that we end up with something about as safe as C is currently - because CPUs are fundamentally unsafe and we need them to work somehow. Rust is from the universe in which micro kernels weren't a dead end and we could avoid all the drivers being written in C.
  - josephg 10mo ago
    > when you start using rust in the real world to get real work done a lot of the promises that were made about safety have to be dropped because you need to boot your computer before the heat death of the universe. Safe rust isn't slow like Python, Go or Fil-C. It gets compiled to normal native code just like C and C++. It generally runs just as fast as C. At least, almost all the time. Arrays have runtime bounds checks. And ... thats about it. > The result will be that we end up with something about as safe as C is currently - because CPUs are fundamentally unsafe and we need them to work somehow. Nah. Most rust is safe rust. Even in the kernel, not much code actually interacts directly with raw hardware. The argument in favour of moving to rust isn't that it will remove 100% of memory safety bugs. Just that it'll hopefully remove most of them.
- uecker 10mo ago
  IMHO, "C is 100% unsafe" is a misleading way to look at it and the kind of exaggeration which I criticize. Also in C only specific language features are unsafe and not all code, and you can screen for these features and also isolate critical code in helper functions. Saying these features could appear everywhere is no difference from "unsafe" possibly appearing everywhere in Rust. I agree that "unsafe" is easier to find as a keyword, but I do not think this is a fundamental advantage, especially in projects where you have a lot of such "unsafe" blocks.
  - Xylakant 10mo ago
    > Saying these features could appear everywhere is no difference from "unsafe" possibly appearing everywhere in Rust. That's not true in practice: Unsafe code is clearly delineated and can be 100% correctly identified. In C, usage of dangerous features can occur at any point and is much harder to clearly separate.
johncolanduoni 10mo ago
One C bug was not taken as clear evidence that we need to abandon C and switch to Rust. Hundreds of thousands of very similar bugs, over decades, in common code patterns were. I’ve never understood how other C or C++ developers could seriously question whether Rust solves any safety problems at all. Maybe the tradeoffs aren’t worth it for a particular use case, but how could you find it unimaginable that even just enforced bounds checks would catch lots of bugs that (normal, non-verified) C would miss? Do you doubt that Python code corrupts memory a lot less because you saw a CPython CVE once? What language do you think Graydon Hoare was spending most of this time writing while he started working of Rust as a side project? Hint: it sure wasn’t Java. Rust is not the product of some developer who has only used 2 scripting languages and had to read the definition of stack-smashing off of Wikipedia showing those C developers how to live in the future. It’s not old enough for many of the developers working on it to have only ever used Rust. It’s mostly C and C++ developers trying to build a new option for solving their same problems.
- Xylakant 10mo ago
  > It’s mostly C and C++ developers trying to build a new option for solving their same problems. I've observed that a lot of the folks I used to meet at ruby conferences have moved to Rust. No idea what led to this, but maybe it's just folks that were generally curious about new programming languages that moved to ruby when it became better known and that the same interest led to adopting Rust.
  - johncolanduoni 10mo ago
    I worked on a Ruby codebase that moved to Rust - I think that part is mostly cargo-culting cool things in the news to be perfectly honest. There’s type safety advantages, but if Ruby’s performance envelope was even conceivably acceptable for your use-case there are likely better options. I strongly suspect a lot of the friction between Rust and only-C/C++ developers is the product of a bunch of people coming at Rust from higher level languages parroting lines about safety, and then looking at you blankly if you ask how it handles nested pointer indirection. But I don’t think that applies to the people actually driving the language forward, just those talking a big game on HN/Reddit.
UltraSane 10mo ago
A million memory error bugs is used as a valid argument to stop using C and switch to rust where such bugs are impossible.
dannersy 10mo ago
Okay, fair that since the majority of the codebase is C and that 150 vulnerabilities is probably negligible in comparison since we're talking about ratios, but if we're to be THAT nuanced then we also need to consider that code has been iterated upon for decades, so, I think the point is moot. The claim has never, ever, been that Rust is bug free. The objective was to help reduce bugs, which is an outcome I've seen first hand in projects I work on. You still seem to speak in aggro terms, so it still feels like an emotional response to Rust.
- queejjd 10mo ago
  What features do you like the most in Rust? Are pattern matching and enums some of them?
  - dannersy 10mo ago
    Ah, credibility attacks. Nice.

by uecker 10mo ago

aw1621107 10mo ago

> Every C bug was taken as clear evidence that we need to abandon C and switch to Rust. I think more charitably it's every "simple" C bug that tends to provoke that reaction. Buffer overflows, use-after-frees, things for which mechanically-enforceable solutions have existed and been widespread for a while. I think more exotic bugs tend to produce more interesting discussions since the techniques for avoiding those bugs tend to be similarly exotic. > So the fact that there are also such bugs in Rust Similarly, I think you need to be careful about what exactly "such bugs" encompasses. This bug wasn't one of the above "simple" bugs IMHO, so I would guess an equivalent bug in C code would at least avoid the worst of the more strident calls you so dislike. Hard to say for sure, though, given our unfortunate lack of a time machine.

uecker 10mo ago
I agree with you that this is more nuanced and that I oversimplified this a bit in my comment.

bitwize 10mo ago

Safe Rust eliminates some of the more common memory bugs in C. The bug under discussion was written in unsafe Rust—but even that doesn't obviate the huge advantages Rust has over C. Even unsafe Rust, for instance, has far fewer UB gotchas than C. And with Rust, you can isolate the tricky bits in 'unsafe' blocks and write higher-level logic in safe Rust, giving your code an extra layer of protection. C is 100% unsafe—"unsafe at any speed" as I like to say.

noosphr 10mo ago
The safest computer is a rock. The point is that when you start using rust in the real world to get real work done a lot of the promises that were made about safety have to be dropped because you need to boot your computer before the heat death of the universe. The result will be that we end up with something about as safe as C is currently - because CPUs are fundamentally unsafe and we need them to work somehow. Rust is from the universe in which micro kernels weren't a dead end and we could avoid all the drivers being written in C.
- josephg 10mo ago
  > when you start using rust in the real world to get real work done a lot of the promises that were made about safety have to be dropped because you need to boot your computer before the heat death of the universe. Safe rust isn't slow like Python, Go or Fil-C. It gets compiled to normal native code just like C and C++. It generally runs just as fast as C. At least, almost all the time. Arrays have runtime bounds checks. And ... thats about it. > The result will be that we end up with something about as safe as C is currently - because CPUs are fundamentally unsafe and we need them to work somehow. Nah. Most rust is safe rust. Even in the kernel, not much code actually interacts directly with raw hardware. The argument in favour of moving to rust isn't that it will remove 100% of memory safety bugs. Just that it'll hopefully remove most of them.
uecker 10mo ago
IMHO, "C is 100% unsafe" is a misleading way to look at it and the kind of exaggeration which I criticize. Also in C only specific language features are unsafe and not all code, and you can screen for these features and also isolate critical code in helper functions. Saying these features could appear everywhere is no difference from "unsafe" possibly appearing everywhere in Rust. I agree that "unsafe" is easier to find as a keyword, but I do not think this is a fundamental advantage, especially in projects where you have a lot of such "unsafe" blocks.
- Xylakant 10mo ago
  > Saying these features could appear everywhere is no difference from "unsafe" possibly appearing everywhere in Rust. That's not true in practice: Unsafe code is clearly delineated and can be 100% correctly identified. In C, usage of dangerous features can occur at any point and is much harder to clearly separate.

johncolanduoni 10mo ago

One C bug was not taken as clear evidence that we need to abandon C and switch to Rust. Hundreds of thousands of very similar bugs, over decades, in common code patterns were. I’ve never understood how other C or C++ developers could seriously question whether Rust solves any safety problems at all. Maybe the tradeoffs aren’t worth it for a particular use case, but how could you find it unimaginable that even just enforced bounds checks would catch lots of bugs that (normal, non-verified) C would miss? Do you doubt that Python code corrupts memory a lot less because you saw a CPython CVE once? What language do you think Graydon Hoare was spending most of this time writing while he started working of Rust as a side project? Hint: it sure wasn’t Java. Rust is not the product of some developer who has only used 2 scripting languages and had to read the definition of stack-smashing off of Wikipedia showing those C developers how to live in the future. It’s not old enough for many of the developers working on it to have only ever used Rust. It’s mostly C and C++ developers trying to build a new option for solving their same problems.

Xylakant 10mo ago
> It’s mostly C and C++ developers trying to build a new option for solving their same problems. I've observed that a lot of the folks I used to meet at ruby conferences have moved to Rust. No idea what led to this, but maybe it's just folks that were generally curious about new programming languages that moved to ruby when it became better known and that the same interest led to adopting Rust.
- johncolanduoni 10mo ago
  I worked on a Ruby codebase that moved to Rust - I think that part is mostly cargo-culting cool things in the news to be perfectly honest. There’s type safety advantages, but if Ruby’s performance envelope was even conceivably acceptable for your use-case there are likely better options. I strongly suspect a lot of the friction between Rust and only-C/C++ developers is the product of a bunch of people coming at Rust from higher level languages parroting lines about safety, and then looking at you blankly if you ask how it handles nested pointer indirection. But I don’t think that applies to the people actually driving the language forward, just those talking a big game on HN/Reddit.

UltraSane 10mo ago

A million memory error bugs is used as a valid argument to stop using C and switch to rust where such bugs are impossible.

dannersy 10mo ago

Okay, fair that since the majority of the codebase is C and that 150 vulnerabilities is probably negligible in comparison since we're talking about ratios, but if we're to be THAT nuanced then we also need to consider that code has been iterated upon for decades, so, I think the point is moot. The claim has never, ever, been that Rust is bug free. The objective was to help reduce bugs, which is an outcome I've seen first hand in projects I work on. You still seem to speak in aggro terms, so it still feels like an emotional response to Rust.

queejjd 10mo ago
What features do you like the most in Rust? Are pattern matching and enums some of them?
- dannersy 10mo ago
  Ah, credibility attacks. Nice.