[irishcoffee]

> The baseline floor of quality will be higher for a Rust program vs. a C program given equal development effort.

Hmm, according to whom, exactly?

> Second, the total possible footprint of entire classes of bugs is zero thanks to design features of Rust (the borrowck, sum types, data race prevention), except in a specifically delineated areas which often total zero in the vast majority of Rust programs.

And yet somehow the internet went down because of a program written in rust that didn’t validate input.

[bigstrat2003]

> Hmm, according to whom, exactly?

Well, Google for one. https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...

> And yet somehow the internet went down because of a program written in rust that didn’t validate input.

You're ignoring other factors (it wasn't just Cloudflare's rust code that led to the issue), but even setting that aside your framing is not accurate. The rust program went down because the programmer made a choice that, given invalid input, it should crash. This could happen in every language ever made. It has nothing to do with rust.

[disappoint]

Google's Android teams also categorize old C code as C++, and mix gotos into their modern C++ code.

[disappoint]

> This could happen in every language ever made. It has nothing to do with rust.

Except it does. This also has to do with culture. In Rust, I get the impression that one can set it up as roughly two communities.

The first does not consider safety, security and correctness to be the responsibility of the language, instead they consider it their own responsibility. They merely appreciate it when the language helps with all that, and take precautions when the language hinders that. They try to be honest with themselves.

The second community is careless, might make various unfounded claims and actions that sometimes border on cultish and gang mob behavior and beliefs, and can for instance spew unwrap() all over codebases even when not appropriate for that kind of project, or claim that a Rust project is memory safe even when unsafe Rust is used all over the place with lots of basic bugs and UB-inducing bugs in it.

The second community is surprisingly large, and is severely detrimental to security, safety and correctness.

[LinXitoW]

Again, this has nothing to do with the point at hand, which is that "in any language, a developer can choose the crash the problem if a unrecoverable state happens". That's it.

Tell me about how these supposed magical groups have anything at all to do with language features. What language can magically conjure triple the memory from thin air because the upstream query returned 200+ entries instead of the 60-ish you're required to support?

[aw1621107]

I don't think you're actually disagreeing with the person you're responding to here. Even if you take your grouping as factual, there's nothing that limits said grouping to Rust programmers. Or in other words:

> This could happen in every language ever made. It has nothing to do with rust.

[kibwen]

> And yet somehow the internet went down because of a program written in rust that didn’t validate input.

What? The Cloudflare bug was from a broken system configuration that eventually cascaded into (among other things) a Rust program with hardcoded limits that crashed loudly. In no way did that Rust program bring down the internet; it was the canary, not the gas leak. Anybody trying to blame Rust for that event has no idea what they're talking about.

[nu11ptr]

> And yet somehow the internet went down because of a program written in rust that didn’t validate input.

Tell me which magic language creates programs free of errors? It would have been better had it crashed and compromised memory integrity instead of an orderly panic due to an invariant the coder didn't anticipate? Type systems and memory safety are nice and highly valuable, but we all know as computer scientists we have yet to solve for logic errors.

[SkiFire13]

> And yet somehow the internet went down because of a program written in rust that didn’t validate input.

No, it _did validate_ the input, and since that was invalid it resulted in an error.

People can yap about that unwrap all they want, but if the code just returned an error to the caller with `?` it would have resulted in a HTTP 500 error anyway.

[irishcoffee]

So it validated in the input and failed in an unsafe way. Is that what you’re saying? Instead of rejecting the input and failing in a safe way.

My only point was, the language doesn’t matter. It could have been written in brainfuck.

I’m bitching about the rust evangelism, obviously. Neat language, protects against NPEs et. al. It isn’t a magic bullet and it never was.

[SkiFire13]

> So it validated in the input and failed in an unsafe way. Is that what you’re saying? Instead of rejecting the input and failing in a safe way.

It rejected the input and "failed" in a loud way (showing an error) for the user, as opposed to not rejecting the invalid input and continuing anyway in a degraded/invalid state, which would instead have allowed users to continue browsing but would not have worked properly for some other purposes (e.g. it probably would not have continued blocking malicious/bad scraper requests). Neither is ideal, though of course depending on your priorities one might be better than the other.

> My only point was, the language doesn’t matter. It could have been written in brainfuck.

Yeah I definitely agree. My point was that the error was also somewhere else, since an internally-controlled input was invalid.