Re: The Case for Rust (in any system)

Warner Losh wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 5, 2024 at 12:10 PM Alan Somers <asomers@freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > By now I expect that most of you have seen the long list of new
> > security advisories that just came out.  Strikingly, all were the
> > result of memory handling errors.  And none of them wouldn't have
> > happened if their respective programs had been written in a
> > memory-safe language.
> >
> 
> FreeBSD represents hundreds of thousands or millions of man hours
> in its current form (depending on how you measure it). It has evolved
> over 30 years. To get to the same level of maturity in a rust rewrite would
> take a similar amount of time. But even if it took an order of magnitude
> less because rust is that much better, that represents a huge pool of
> manpower that don't seem to be hanging out around the project just
> waiting for something to do.
> 
> Where do the resources for this come from? Without enough resources,
> the rewrites will be crap and nobody will want to use them (or maybe even
> FreeBSD). The rewrites to date have lost functionality (though maybe not
> functionality that's important) relative to what they replace.
> 
> So great, we should switch to rust. But so far we have no way to do that
> incrementally (other than a parallel build system, which isn't very
> FreeBSDish).
> And if we can't even find the resources to do that minimal level of work,
> how
> can the rest possibly be robustly undertaken?

I second that.

Christos