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by filleokus 680 days ago
> Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area.

Could you name some advantages? I would agree Rust has huge advantages compared to C/C++, and Rust also has a much bigger presence in the "security space". But I would say that's more because of Rust's lack of GC, smaller footprint which works in embedded systems etc.

I guess you could say that Rust's type system being more expressive might eliminate certain classes of bugs, which have security implications. But "huge advantages"?

(Honestly I'm not flame baiting, I'm genuinely curious if my worldview is wrong)

2 comments

I think lack of union/sum types, i.e. lack of compiler exhaustivity checks on cases is pretty relevant here. For security applications the goal is maximum stringency w.r.t. correctness so I think “huge advantage “ isn’t an exaggeration regarding sum types. It’s not like “have you checked all cases” is an unimportant question when trying to prove correctness.
> But "huge advantages"?

They don't call null/nil the billion dollar mistake for nothing.