[nullc]

People slipping backdoors into stuff are no doubt super enthusiastic about Rust both for the opportunity for new anonymous nobodies to rewrite long stable and proven tools as well as the dependency ecosystem that tends to blindly pull in multiple different entire HTTPS/TLS stacks into anything but the most trivial software.

[tialaramex]

I don't buy it. Rust has a really good track record on attracting more people to read and modify the code, which isn't what you want if you're hiding backdoors in the code.

In decades of writing C (sometimes as a hobby, often for a lot of money) I'd guess I thought "These errors when I wrote bugs in my program are crap, somebody should fix it" maybe once per month on average. But a C compiler is very intimidating code, subtle and hard to even build from scratch let alone contribute to, so I never attempted to make such changes.

In only a few years of writing Rust (none of that paid) exactly twice I've thought "Man this compiler error diagnostic isn't very good, somebody should fix it". The first time I asked on Reddit, and I was informed that I wasn't the first to notice, the fixed diagnostic was in nightly Rust already. The second time I found the diagnostic and I just fixed it, compiled first time, wrote a new unit test, checked that passed, wrote a pull request. Landed it. Then I wrote a HN comment, a reader found a bug in my diagnostic, so I fixed the original code, and wrote a new PR which also landed. If Rust has told you that instead of 'X' when you needed a byte, you should write b'X' because just 'X' is a char not a byte - that's me, that's my small fix. [Before the fix 'X' wasn't legal here, of course, but the diagnostic wouldn't suggest what to write instead]

[nullc]

I'm not sure how modifying the compiler is relevant to the point. I think it's the general trend that early in languages lives its much easier to contribute to the tools, after decades of amassing improvements (such as yours!) they tend to become less accessible.

But regardless, the "rewrite in rust" advocacy has created a significant opportunity for projects created by single people, without outside review and often without significant domain expertise (at least where they are slavish re-implementations of existing code), to be proposed as replacements for longstanding stable tools. Whatever the merits of that chance it's also dream for someone looking to introduce new vulnerabilities. Even where the replacement itself is reviewed it will usually come with a massively expanded dependency footprint which isn't.

[tialaramex]

The compiler is illustrative. A large piece of Rust software, nevertheless easier to read and contribute to when compared to similar software in the same category.

[karma_pharmer]

Um, no.