Speculative: Rust for base system components

[Igor Mozolevsky]

On Sat, 5 Jan 2019 at 19:16, Enji Cooper wrote:
>
> > On Jan 3, 2019, at 12:24, Igor Mozolevsky wrote:
> ...
>
> > And by what metric is that "safety" measured, how does one measure
> > "safety" objectively? To me, that sounds like a techie version of
> > virtue-signalling... Even the Rust-clan seem to be rather confused
> > about it: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/meet-safe-and-unsafe.html
>
> It’s pretty clear to me what the author means: rust features safe and unsafe
> extensions, much like C++, Java, Perl, python, tcl, etc. Generally speaking,
> “unsafe” language features are those that require additional care, like using
> malloc/free appropriately, avoiding global state, locking resources as needed,
> etc.
>
> > Btw, Java is "safe" too, and it's been around for *much* longer!
>
> Not necessarily true. Are you aware of how native java extensions work?
>
> Java as a language was written to be generic/platform agnostic, however in
> order to be useful, Java requires platform extensions. As such, Java
> supports developers writing glue code in C/C++ (like python extensions),
> which can have a host of potential issues with memory leaks, concurrency
> safety, etc, in addition to potential issues with security sandboxing and the like.
>
> With the number of zero-day bugs in java that have been in the language
> in the past few years, I don’t trust the language’s sense of safety in terms
> of memory management and sandboxing in the JVM.


You're being deliberately obtuse, right? Because there's no "native
Rust extensions" (i. e. you can't make Rust call a buggy and unsafe
c-library)? And can you seriously guarantee that there will be no
zero-day bugs in Rust libraries, there's probably none *found* yet
simply because hardly anyone does anything serious in it! Your slating
of Java is just as applicable to Rust with the caveat that Rust has
been  around and thus explored and abused far less. Why would you
trust automagic memory management in Rust when you don't trust
Java's? Rhetorical, of course, as there's no sensible answer.



--
Igor M.