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What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

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Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#131

Post by [deleted] »

jesse__ wrote: post #95
jackmott42 wrote: post #91

Earlier 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…

I'd venture that the development slowdown from using rust is closer to 50% than 5%. Even just compile times probably slow down that much, not to mention you have to write (sometimes) as much as 10x code to express yourself. The specific exercise I have in mind is a lockless thread queue. < 20 lines in C .. ~200 lines in Rust.

[deleted]

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#132

Post by OneWingedShark »

axilmar wrote: post #56

Rust 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…

Look at Ada and its error-messages.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#133

Post by bilkow »

scoutt wrote: post #107
proto_lambda wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big hurdle for C++ programmers learning Rust that I've seen time and time again in various community support channels is fixing their trust issues with the compiler. They are so used to compiler output being useless or worse than useless, they are unable to take advantage of rustc's stellar diagnostics (which frequently tell you exactly what you need to change to make things work) until they force themselves to a…

> big hurdle Without going much further, to me it's the syntax. I can write some Rust lines of code, and I appreciate the compiler output to correct my syntax. But it's really difficult to me to read code written by others. I can't open a random file of a Rust project and have a minimal clue of what's going on After years of C and some C++, I have a parser implanted in my cerebellum, and it's hard to adapt it to Rust…

Oh yeah, I feel your pain, my brain is really used to Rust/Swift and Python syntax, and when I have to read Typescript/React, C++ or something like Nix, it gets hard for my brain to parse it. Loved the eyesight analogy!

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#134

Post by scatters »

sitkack wrote: post #59
ordu wrote: post #42

Earlier 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. You know, I'm a Rust evangelist. And I can tell you, why I ignore logic bugs when trying to sell Rust. Rust can prevent some logic bugs if they break invariant you managed to encode or enforce in your types. But it is a difficult topic to dive in a…

You often encounter this entire thread of rhetoric when someone wants to put a diversion into the central argument, yeah but it doesn't ____. But Rust does do that, match exhaustiveness, forcing the handling of errors and the type system enables things like CreuSAT [1] using creusot [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31780128 [2] https://github.com/xldenis/creusot > Creusot works by translating Rust code to…

You mean like Boost.Units?

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#135

Post by duckerude »

boris wrote: post #110
jackmott42 wrote: post #91

Earlier 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…

Some people make the opposite claim: Rust lets you get away with less dynamic allocation (and more data shared between threads) because you can rely on the compiler checking your work.

The effect might be positive or negative depending on the circumstances.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#136

Post by duckerude »

smolder wrote: post #114
boris wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've found it very easy to get started with fuzzing in Rust using cargo-fuzz. I didn't do anything very advanced, and my closest point of reference is testing Python with Hypothesis, but it did turn up bugs.

Here's a Rust fuzzing story from yesterday: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/fuzzing-rust-minidump-for-...

It claims that Rust is particularly suitable for it because integer overflow panics in debug builds (and out of bounds indexing always panics), which sounds reasonable.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#137

Post by melissalobos »

jackmott42 wrote: post #91
shuger wrote: post #31

Earlier 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

Which very notably does NOT use C++.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#138

Post by jackmott42 »

boris wrote: post #110
jackmott42 wrote: post #91

Earlier 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…

That is a fair thing to wonder about, but at the moment most of the design decisions Rust pushes you toward tend to be better for performance on modern hardware. For instance using an array based arena to store a graph, instead of the traditional allocation of a chunk of memory per node on the heap. Or just keeping more stuff on the stack.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#139

Post by jackmott42 »

3a2d29 wrote: post #119
jackmott42 wrote: post #91

Earlier 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…

> 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.

A fair point, though the few security issues in recent years I've looked at were not the kind of thing you would turn to unsafe rust for. But I've certainly not done a broad enough sampling to say what % of cases are like that.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#140

Post by [deleted] »

sitkack wrote: post #61
sgift wrote: post #54

Earlier 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.

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