Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
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Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
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Re: Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
#2This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what's great about Rust.
The case for rust is not its memory safety, but its expressiveness through zero cost abstractions, one of which is memory safety.
Re: Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
#3>In programmer world, you really can’t beat this argument. Because programmers are hyper-rational.
This may be one of the biggest lies I've ever seen on the internet
Re: Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
#4This is not a particularly compelling post.
Re: Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
#5>In programmer world, you really can’t beat this argument. Because programmers are hyper-rational. This may be one of the biggest lies I've ever seen on the internet
This whole post has a very hyperbolic feel to it that hurts whatever substance there might be to the argument.
Re: Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
#6>In programmer world, you really can’t beat this argument. Because programmers are hyper-rational. This may be one of the biggest lies I've ever seen on the internet
I laughed out loud at how wrong that statement was.
Re: Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
#7This case against Rust is not particularly compelling:
1. It strawmans the pro-Rust case by suggesting that Rust is presented as a panacea.
2. It argues that because Rust can’t help with everything, it helping with an important issue (memory safety) is irrelevant.
The crux of it is basically this:
> But this is just throwing the baby out with the bath water. Clearly. Because we have tonnes of safe code, and no one knows why its safe.
We do know that it is safe. We know that it is memory safe. This rhetorical conflation of memory safety and some other form of safety is an issue.
> We need diversity in strategy. We need to actually understand what security means and how existing programs that ARE secure, are written that way.
Absolutely. And using tools that help eliminate entire classes of bugs is an important part of that diversity of strategy.
Re: Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
#8> But… hang on. What about all the code that doesn’t have vunerabilities?
> …we have tonnes of safe code, and no one knows why its [sic] safe.
This is not a serious person.
Re: Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
#9So I'm not sure entirely followed that. I think there's a significant thread of frustration with portions of the community that push rust as the end all be all that has to be used everywhere (or at least it really does feel like that sometimes), and I'm sympathetic to that (I tend to be in the camp of "if you can use a language with managed memory than just do that"). But I really don't understand the thing about unknown unknowns. And maybe the part before that? I mean, it would be interesting to talk to the OpenBSD developers and see why they don't have a track record of shipping memory vulnerabilities, if that's the intention.
Re: Why the case for Rust is not particularly compelling
#10>In programmer world, you really can’t beat this argument. Because programmers are hyper-rational. This may be one of the biggest lies I've ever seen on the internet
Given that that felt like it was written a bit ironically, perhaps it would be better to say because programmers perceive themselves as hyper-rational and then proceed to make irrational decisions on that very basis.