If only rust caught blogging security errors.
It's a terrible idea to post a photo of your child with her name on your public blog.
It's one of those subtle security things that the rust compiler helps with; but not here, sadly.
What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
111–120 of 192 posts
Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The point you did ignore was: Rust is being sold as magically making software safe and people selling that completely ignore the fact that logical bugs are also a thing. There are straw men and then there are straw man armies. This is probably the biggest one I've seen yet.
Ohh, I got one. Rust is less secure than C++ because it causes people to be overconfident in its security properties. The sharp edges of C++ are a feature that cause people to focus on correctness, not just get it for free.
You jest, but that used to be an argument against making seatbelts mandatory in cars. I suppose people would drive even more safely if there was a sharp metal spike sticking out of the center of the steering wheel.
Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
#113This article is super overcomplicated. All it had to say was that rust tells you when you keep reference to on stack variable after it goes out of scope. Context provided adds nothing. I must say - as someone who doesn't use rust - I haven't had this type of issue in years, and when I did it wasn't hard to debug. You get corrupted data, set data breakpoint and in the provided example you will see it being modified by…
Reviewing commits for a security-critical project written in C or C++ can be incredibly tedious. I've spent an entire day trying to validate that the assumptions made by a 10-line change are memory-safe in the context of the larger program. These reviews are incredibly mentally draining, and even when I'm done I'm not 100% sure that I didn't miss something and let a vulnerability into the codebase.
Rust is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Worrying about memory safety isn't even a concern for the vast majority of commits that don't touch modules with unsafe code. All assumptions made about the lifetimes of references are made explicit in the code, and checked by the compiler. On rust projects I find I have much more mental energy to use against other aspects of the problem.
Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see many C++ programmers say stuff like this, and maybe it is the case that studios exist which can do C++ without mistakes related to memory management or sigils and so on, but I also observe that: 1. High quality teams like the Linux kernel team and PostgreSQL, do periodically have serious security bugs that are things Rust would have caught. 2. I see sometimes C++ instructors making the same claims you do and th…
> There are however valid questions, like if Rust slows down your development say, 5%, would you get more net safety from spending 5% more time testing/fuzzing c++ code instead? etc. I think a similarly valid question is how often you resorted to dynamic allocations just to get the borrow checker off your back. If your Rust version uses 5% more dynamic memory (with the corresponding performance and memory footprint p…
If you're willing to jump back to C++ to get around the borrow checker strictness, couldn't you just use Rust's unsafe block where you're sure it won't result in a bug?
Is it harder to fuzz Rust? Honest question, because fuzzing is something I occasionally read about but am not practiced in.
Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ohh, I got one. Rust is less secure than C++ because it causes people to be overconfident in its security properties. The sharp edges of C++ are a feature that cause people to focus on correctness, not just get it for free.
You jest, but that used to be an argument against making seatbelts mandatory in cars. I suppose people would drive even more safely if there was a sharp metal spike sticking out of the center of the steering wheel.
This assumes that each person is responsible for their own safety. But you have no control over the other guy that puts people at risk. By mocking it, maybe we can prevent this form of argumentation earlier?
Hopefully in 20 years or less we will see unsafe code in the same way we view leaded gas, cigarettes and CO2. The other thing I realized in the last couple years is that eventually, everything becomes safety critical to someone at some point. That if you think you have to just protect this one system but that others can fail, is flawed on large scales. You can't tractably realize the failure graph, and nor can you prevent a seemingly innocuous thing from being used in a critical way.
The pandemic was a great lens into how human resilience kept flawed systems functioning in a way that few realized were flawed. The pharmacies in my area are still recovering only to have their problem exacerbated by more rigid controls that prevent local autonomy from making the system resilient. In this particular case, automation has made a problem worse by preventing humans from doing the little local silent repairs that they were previously doing.
Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's true. In a sense, c++ requires good code structuring. That's also part of why I enjoy returning to c++, the people involved know how to structure code and create clean architecture. That said, sometimes c++ does get in the way. Creating trees or graphs can be cumbersome, and IMO it's very biased towards virtual methods to solve polymorphism. Extending lifetimes by pooling or similar is also quite common,…
> and IMO it's very biased towards virtual methods to solve polymorphism. Is it? These days I'd expect C++ to be very biased towards using templates for polymorphism. After all, templates are a thing that C++ provides with functionality that other languages often lack, whereas in the field of virtual methods/"dynamic dispatch OOP" C++ severely lags behind other languages. Choosing between two features of a language a…
I do not think C++ "lags severely in the field of virtual methods". I use both OOP and template based polymorphism depending on particular needs and see no significant problems in either.
Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
#117So many words to describe a simple issue of using reference to out of scope data. Anyways I am using C++ a lot and this types of bugs are easily caught by analyzers or straight up by modern IDEs like CLion (you get a warning).
Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
#118Rust is undoubtedly a step forward in correctness, but boy, the article's code is so thick that for me, that I am a C++ programmer, is almost unreadable, especially for a quick reading... I skipped all the code and only read the text. I got to the point where it mentions that the language prevented them from storing a pointer to a stack object in a heap object, and that's really great, but boy oh boy, the code presen…
After reading a good chunk of the Programming Rust book (minus concurrency, async and macros) I can understand that. My C++ experience helped a lot in comprehending and mentally mapping Rust concepts.
As far as I can tell, that’s normal Rust code, but yes it’s unreadable if you come from C++ or another language and don’t know Rust syntax. The funny thing is that this kind of code is supposed to be the readable part of Rust :-)
Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work in probably what is considered one of the least "safe" languages: C++ The issues that Rust is supposed to help with are simply not what we spent time on. All the bugs reported are pretty much exclusively root caused to "business logic". From recent time I can recall only one that was a programming mistake and not architecture/business logic related. It was a missing break in a switch that already had some fall…
I see many C++ programmers say stuff like this, and maybe it is the case that studios exist which can do C++ without mistakes related to memory management or sigils and so on, but I also observe that: 1. High quality teams like the Linux kernel team and PostgreSQL, do periodically have serious security bugs that are things Rust would have caught. 2. I see sometimes C++ instructors making the same claims you do and th…
> High quality teams like the Linux kernel team and PostgreSQL, do periodically have serious security bugs that are things Rust would have caught.
Safe rust would have caught. If you had to drop into unsafe to do what they did, the serious security bugs would still have happened.
Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and IMO it's very biased towards virtual methods to solve polymorphism. Is it? These days I'd expect C++ to be very biased towards using templates for polymorphism. After all, templates are a thing that C++ provides with functionality that other languages often lack, whereas in the field of virtual methods/"dynamic dispatch OOP" C++ severely lags behind other languages. Choosing between two features of a language a…
I do not think C++ "lags severely in the field of virtual methods". I use both OOP and template based polymorphism depending on particular needs and see no significant problems in either.
C++ can't do things today that Smalltalk and CLOS were able to do in the 1980s already; how is it not lagging behind in OOP? Hell, companies like Trolltech had to extend C++ for their own purposes to provide just a subset of the extra features (relative to standard C++) that had already been available in environments like Smalltalk or CLOS.