Rust in Android: move fast and fix things

Post by selfmodruntime » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:11 PM UTC

pizlonator wrote: post #31

gpm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first chart does in fact a compelling reason to believe the effect is not that at all. If the "easy" code was predominantly being rewritten you would expect to % new memory unsafe code and % memory safety vulnerabilities to scale at different rates as the difficult to work on areas remained in C and kept causing new memory vulnerabilities. Personal experience also provides a compelling reason, my experience is ab…

I would expect memory safety vulns to be dropping in most C/C++ projects due to better practices

Post by tcfhgj » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:11 PM UTC

delusional wrote: post #35

I don't understand the graphs presented here. On the first graph showing "New Memory Unsafe Code" and "Memory safety Vulns" we don't have any steady state. The amount of both "unsafe code" and "memory safety vulns" had apparently already been dropping before 2019. None the matter though, we see a great big drop at 2022 in both. Then in the next graph, showing "Rust" and "C++", we see that the amount of C++ code writt…

Post by selfmodruntime » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:13 PM UTC

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #14

mk89 wrote: post #2

This is the bomb that sank C++ in 2026. Have fun justifying that Rust is "also" unsafe, with the right tools you can achieve the same in C++, if you're a great dev you can do even better, etc.

I mean we know for sure Rust is unsafe there is whole bug tracker dedicated to all the ways it's unsafe. My favorite is that you can cast any lifetime to static no matter how short it actually is in 100% safe Rust. (doesn't mean it's not an improvement on C++)

Post by dwattttt » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

pizlonator wrote: post #32

littlestymaar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That gnarly horrid mess that only a few greybeards grok and has massive test coverage, a long tail of requirements enforced by tests and experience, and a culture of extreme rigor? Longer reviews, more rollbacks, and less likely to be rewritten. I'd say that this is likely the most likely to be rewritten actually, because high test coverage is a massive enabler in such a rewrite, and because having a project that “…

> It's more of one additional anecdotal evidence that Rust is good. But that means it's likely to be the worst kind of science: - Group of people agree that Rust is good. This is a belief they hold. - Same group of people feel the need to search for argument that their belief is good. - The group does "science" like this. And then the rest of us have a data point that we think we can trust, when in reality, it's just…

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #38

pjmlp wrote: post #5

Note that Google still doesn't have official support for using Rust in Android userspace, though. Despite all pluses on the blog, NDK only supports C and C++ tooling, same on Android Studio, and it is up to the community to do the needful work, if anyone feels like using Rust instead.

Nobody's stopping you from using the NDK to compile Rust though. Android's ABI is just an ABI like any other. The system doesn't care if you built an .so using Rust or anything else so long as it plays by the rules.