Re: The Case for Rust (in any system)

On Thu 05 Sep 12:09, Alan Somers 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.
> 
> In fact, of all the C bug fixes that I've been involved with (as
> either author or reviewer) since May, about three quarters could've
> been avoided just by using a better language.
> 
> The real takeaway here is that C is no longer sufficient for writing
> high quality code in the 2020s.  Everyone needs to adapt their tools.
> Programmers who don't will increasingly come to resemble experimental
> archaeologists, i.e. people who learn flintknapping to "keep the
> knowledge alive".  Such people are valuable, but definitely niche.  I
> for one don't want my career to go in that trajectory.
> 
> To summarize, here's the list of this week's security advisories, and
> also some other recent C bug fixes of my own involvement:
> 

Jumping on this one, I think at least that is my understanding from the previous
threads, that using some rust has not been rejected, so keeping discussing
at length and trying to force convince people will not lead to anything that
would make progress on the rust integration process.

On the other side there have been many "work to do, problem to solve" that has
been raised to allow to make it happen, so far I have seen none of the rust
people actually trying to work on solving those issues, I would have expected
now to see patches, design proposals, questions and so on to move forward.

For the people who want to see rust usage in base, it is time to start the
actual hard part if you don't want those threads to be seen as "yakafokon" (as
we say in french, I don't know if there is an equivalent of it):
- make a plan
- write patch and poc on how to integrate to our build system
- discuss with the people who volunteered to help on the build system, on the
  release engineering, or on the packaging side.
- create AND lead the working group to make this happen.

Best regards,
Bapt