uecker

22 ms·

661.
by uecker 10mo ago
There were certainly a lot of people running around claiming that "Rust eliminates the whole class of memory safety bugs." Of course, not everybody made such claims, but some did. Whether it is "significantly easier" t
662.
by uecker 10mo ago
I agree with you that this is more nuanced and that I oversimplified this a bit in my comment.
663.
by 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 isol
664.
by uecker 10mo ago
> There's no world where Rust is more unsafe than C though so it's all academic I think Rust is more unsafe than C due to supply chain issues in the Rust ecosystem, which have not fully materialized yet. Rust certainly has an
665.
by uecker 10mo ago
It is very common for C implementation to define undefined behavior and also common for C programs to rely on this. For this reason, I think it is very misleading to say that undefined behavior is automatically exploitable or even a bug.
666.
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
667.
by uecker 10mo ago
That is is undefined behavior does not mean it is exploitable. But I also have not seen an argument why a data race should not be exploitable in this context.
668.
by uecker 10mo ago
It is entertaining to observe that how - after the bullshit and propaganda phase - Rust now slowly enters reality and the excuses for problems that did not magically disappear are now exactly the same as what we saw before from C programmer
669.
by uecker 10mo ago
This is certainly not true. But also arguments about "common" are completely misleading as long as there is many orders of magnitude more C code than Rust code.
670.
by uecker 10mo ago
Was it? It seems more a fantastic demonstration how the same type of errors can also occur in Rust code.
671.
by uecker 11mo ago
It wasn't me trying to conclude anything from insufficient data.
672.
by uecker 11mo ago
As a scientist, I would not trust self reports from the industry too much. Even if those are honest, there are too many things that could bias this.
673.
by uecker 11mo ago
Yes, but the arguments why we need to replace C code with Rust was not that it is better by "helping the programmer check themselves" but that we need to switch to memory-safe languages because it "removes a whole class of er
674.
by uecker 11mo ago
Github says 0.3% of the kernel code is Rust. But even normalized to lines of code, I think counting CVEs would not measure anything meaningful.
675.
by uecker 11mo ago
Somebody (tsoding?) called "unsafe" in Rust a "blame shifting device". If a bug was in an "unsafe" block, it is not Rust's fault, but solely the responsibility of the programmer, while every bug in a C pro
676.
by uecker 11mo ago
You can label something an "explicit escape hatch" or a "latent property of the system", but in the end such labels are irrelevant. While I agree that it may be easier to review unsafe blocks in Rust compared to reviewin
677.
by uecker 11mo ago
I think making things more explicit with "unsafe" is an advantage of Rust, but I think "far better" is a bit of an exaggeration. In C you need to audit pointer arithmetic, malloc/free, casts and unons. If you lim
678.
by uecker 11mo ago
Yes, I know about High-C although I did not know that it still exists. Thanks!
679.
by uecker 11mo ago
This seems reasonable to me. If you have a tarmaggeedon, you update one library instead of thousand of packages. Although I am not sure how well this can work in Rust with monomorphization.
680.
by uecker 11mo ago
I guess the want to be able to update individual libraries to provide security updates.
681.
by uecker 11mo ago
> I disagree because I've seen closures shine (in OCaml) and suck terribly (in C++). Well, I also do not want to see C++ style closures in C and I fully agree about your point regarding control and explicitness. I also agree that s
682.
by uecker 11mo ago
And of course, "impossible to refactor" just is very deep in the bullshit territory. "more fun to write new code" would probably be more honest, and the Rust proponents created a marketing narrative that allows them to
683.
by uecker 11mo ago
The distribution I use already has limited security updates for Rust: https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.... which reduces my security. The cargo supply chain issues are also very obv
684.
by uecker 11mo ago
A million sales (I heard 1-2 million) for N9 are very good, considering that smartphone sales were in the millions at that time and that it was not sold in the US, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain etc. and had no marketing. Wikipedia says
685.
by uecker 11mo ago
The N9 could have saved the company in my opinion. It was great. I had it for some years before it broke and then found the Android I had afterwards to be poor compared to it.
686.
by uecker 11mo ago
The N9 was not sold in any major country. I ordered mine from Poland (from the US at that time).
687.
by uecker 11mo ago
I owned the N9. This was a phone which was perfectly good also for average users, and it seems it sold very well in the few markets where it was actually sold (sadly no major markets). But when it came to the market, it was already decid
688.
by uecker 11mo ago
I might make such comments as long as other continue to make statements about Rust vs Cs. which I think are exaggerated. As long as people make such statements, it is obviously not a strawman.
689.
by uecker 11mo ago
It seems they worry about it, which I can understand. But now with Rust I worry about about new logic bugs, supply chain issues, and lack of proper security updates.
690.
by uecker 11mo ago
This is a bit of an exaggeration. Many types of bugs can also happen with Rust, and with you use unsafe or have some dependency that uses it, then also memory safety bugs. At the same time, it is possible to reduce the probability and imp

More ›