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by pdimitar 165 days ago
For your last sentence, I believe topics are conflated here.

Of course if one writes unsafe Rust and it leads to a CVE then that's on them. Who's denying that?

On the other hand, having to interact with the part of the landscape that's written in C mandates the use of the `unsafe` keyword and not everyone is ideally equipped to be careful.

I view the existence of `unsafe` as pragmatism; Rust never would have taken off without it. And if 5% of all Rust code is potentially unsafe, well, that's still much better than C where you can trivially introduce undefined behavior with many built-in constructs.

Obviously we can't fix everything in one fell swoop.

1 comments

>>Of course if one writes unsafe Rust and it leads to a CVE then that's on them. >>Who's denying that?

>>The recent bug in the Linux kernel Rust code, based on my understanding, was >>in unsafe code, and related to interop with C. So I wouldn't really classify >>it as a Rust bug.

Sometimes it's good to read the whole thread.

I did and it does not quite compute. That was glue code, related to interoperating with C. Not a "normal" everyday Rust code. It's an outlier.

Helps to read and ingest context.

Though I do agree that in the strictest of technical senses it's indeed a "Rust" bug, as in: bug in code written in Rust.

Why is glue code not normal code in Rust? I don't think anyone else would say that for any other language out there. Does it physically pain you to admit it's a bug in Rust code? I write bugs in all kind of languages and never feel the need for adjectives like "technical", "normal", "everyday" or words like "outlier" to make me feel not let down by the language of choice.
I have worked with Rust for ~3.5 years. I had to use the `unsafe` keyword, twice. In that context it's definitely not everyday code. Hence it's difficult to use that to gauge the language and the ecosystem.

Of course it's a bug in Rust code. It's just not a bug that you would have to protect against often in most workplaces. I probably would have allowed that bug easily because it's not something I stumble upon more than once a year, if even that.

To that effect, I don't believe it's fair to gauge the ecosystem by such statistical outliers. I make no excuses for the people who allowed the bug. This thread is a very good demonstration as to why: everything Rust-related is super closely scrutinized and immediately blown out of proportion.

As for the rest of your emotionally-loaded language -- get civil, please.

I don't care if there can be a bug in Rust code. It doesn't diminish the language for me. I don't appreciate mental gymnastics when evidence is readily available and your comments come out as compulsive defense of something nobody was really is attacking. I'm sorry for the jest in the comments.
I did latch onto semantics for a little time, that much is true, but you are making it look much worse than it is. And yes I get a PTSD and an eye-roll-syndrome from the constant close scrutiny of Rust even though I don't actively work with it for a while now. It gets tiring to read and many interpretations are dramatically negative for no reason than some imagined "Rust zealots always defending it" which I have not seen in a long time here on HN.

But you and me seem to be much closer in opinion and a stance than I thought. Thanks for clarifying that.

The bug in question is in rust glue code that interfaces with a C library. It's not in the rust-C interface or on the C side. If you write python glue code that interfaces with numpy and there's a bug in your glue, it's a python bug not a numpy bug.
I already agreed that technically it is indeed a bug in the Rust code. I would just contest that such a bug is representative is all. People in this thread seem way too eager to extrapolate which is not intellectually curious or fair.
Nobody is extrapolating from this bug to the rest of rust. The comment I responded to initially was denying that this was a rust bug.
You and a few others don't -- I did not make that clear, apologies. It's disheartening that a good amount of others do.