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0 pointspdimitar3y ago0 comments

No, I never would have imagined. /s

Point is, many don't do it. And they don't tell anyone. And they deploy important software. And then we get unpleasantly surprised years (or decades) later.

Same argument as with C++: proponents say that the modern C++ is almost like Rust which is cool and I am happy for them, but there are literal hundreds of millions of C++ coding lines out there that will never get upgraded. Having a cop-out like "yeah but the modern version is better" doesn't help legacy code.

Rust on the other hand is super strict for a long time now. They did the right thing.

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megous3y ago· 3 in thread

Sorry, I don't know any important C codebase that omits necessary bounds checks casually. Often times it would not even make any sense. (If you want to iterate over an array, you don't just iterate until infinity, lol.) String manipulation is often wrapped in functions that handle length/storage size/reallocation/etc in the background.

pdimitarOP3y ago

Nobody is saying they do it casually. People genuinely believe they are without fault, which leads to stuff like Heartbleed (and many others; from 2017 to 2020 there was a number of HN submissions about various well-known pieces of software having buffer under/over-flows).

I heard the ideal theory you cite, many many times. Yet many people still do mistakes. How does that fit in your world-view?

megous3y ago

Not sure what ideal theory you mean. I didn't state any.

Most of the code in my Linux distro is written in C, yet I don't see many segfaults or data corruption in my favorite tools, even those exposed to the internet. It just works. Supposed buffer overflows and double-frees don't affect me daytoday despite 95%+ code I run being written in C, "catastrophic" issues like heartbleed notwithstanding.

People make mistakes, sure. They'll make them with "safe" languages, too. Rust programs are not immune from mistakes. They'll just be of a different kind.

PHP is memory safe, and there were many easily exploited (not just exploitable) vulnerabilities in software written with PHP. (and it doesn't even have escape hatches out of its memory safety)

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Yoric3y ago

For context, an obligatory reference (slash shameless self-promotion) to definitions of safety and safe languages.

https://yoric.github.io/post/safety-and-security/

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