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by coldtea 1850 days ago
>The idea is that language will not solve poorly designed software

Another idea is that a software can have a great design but still be full of security holes. C allows for that.

If we leave it to the "adequately advanced programmer" to avoid those, we're doing it wrong - with plenty of historical examples to prove this.
1 comments
afarrell 1850 days ago
Caveat: Saying “Just write it in rust” won’t change the fact that writing secure software is hard.

The only thing that will actually prevent security holes is attentive software engineers deliberately choosing to learn tools and practice habits to avoid security holes by design. The professional judgement of a lot of those engineers is leading them to choose to learn rust right now.

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pdimitar 1850 days ago
> Caveat: Saying “Just write it in rust” won’t change the fact that writing secure software is hard.

Absolutely. It's just that statistically the memory safety bugs have been the dominant percent of all the bugs, so rewriting core tools in a memory-safe language does make sense.

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afarrell 1849 days ago
Indeed.

Time & attention are limited resources. By eliminating the dominant class of bugs you have more time and attention for more subtle bugs.

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pdimitar 1849 days ago
> Time & attention are limited resources. By eliminating the dominant class of bugs you have more time and attention for more subtle bugs.

Beautifully articulated.

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coldtea 1850 days ago
>Caveat: Saying “Just write it in rust” won’t change the fact that writing secure software is hard.

No. But it will make sure there are no issues of the type buffer overflow and such.

The rest, we can judge when the software is delivered.

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scoutt 1849 days ago
> it will make sure

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1902...

I'm not so sure....

And those are bugs from from people writing core stuff, like you know, the people who should know Rust better than you and me. People writing foundational code that your program will run on top of.

Of special danger is the last CVE, that was rushed and backported into the last release. But nobody talks about it. I can imagine why.

I can bet that the "but the bug happened within unsafe code" excuse will be the next Rust meme.

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edg-l 1849 days ago
I think this comment (on this same post) is relevant here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27318979
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