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What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

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Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#61

Post by josephg »

nekiwo wrote: post #33

Unrelated to the language debate, but it seems a lot of people here missed the fact that Rust Coreutils project is licensed under MIT, and I am not sure if I feel that it is the appropriate license for such project. As much as FSF's philosophy has bad PR at times with Stallman, the GPL licenses really do protect open source. Who knows what Canonical would do when all parts of Ubuntu become MIT...

What evil deeds are you worried about in particular? What are you afraid people will do now that coreutils is MIT?

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#62

Post by kittiepryde »

pizlonator wrote: post #41
elteto wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As unsafe as C or C++. In fact, safer, because only the ABI surface is unsafe, the rust code behind it can be as safe or unsafe as you want it to be. I was addressing this portion of your comment: "C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge". If the C ABI is what enables software to get huge then Rust is already there. There is a second claim in your comment about a "safe ABI", bu…

Here's the problem. If you told me that you rebuilt the Linux userland with Rust but you used C ABI at all of the boundaries, then I would be pretty convinced that you did not create a meaningful improvement to security because of how many dynamic linking boundaries there are. So many of the libraries involved are small, and big or small they expose ABIs that involve pointers to buffers and manual memory management.…

Would a safe ABI work with sandboxing the C code? I'm a bit unsure how one would construct a safe C ABI from Rust's side,

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#63

Post by duped »

pizlonator wrote: post #41
elteto wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As unsafe as C or C++. In fact, safer, because only the ABI surface is unsafe, the rust code behind it can be as safe or unsafe as you want it to be. I was addressing this portion of your comment: "C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge". If the C ABI is what enables software to get huge then Rust is already there. There is a second claim in your comment about a "safe ABI", bu…

Here's the problem. If you told me that you rebuilt the Linux userland with Rust but you used C ABI at all of the boundaries, then I would be pretty convinced that you did not create a meaningful improvement to security because of how many dynamic linking boundaries there are. So many of the libraries involved are small, and big or small they expose ABIs that involve pointers to buffers and manual memory management.…

How could a safe dynamic linking API ever work?

I think you're moving the goalposts significantly here.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#64

Post by pizlonator »

sagarm wrote: post #52
pizlonator wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is as good as C. It's also as bad as C. I'm saying that the chasm to cross is a safe ABI.

There is no existing safe ABI, so this cannot be an adoption barrier.

Lots of reasons why it is. I'll give you two.

1) It can't be that replacing 20 C/C++ shared objects with 20 Rust shared objects results in 20 copies of the Rust standard library and other dependencies that those Rust libraries pull in. But, today, that is what happens. For some situations, this is too much of a memory usage regression to be tolerable.

2) If you really have 20 libraries calling into one another using C ABI, then you end up with manual memory management and manual buffer offset management everywhere even if you rewrite the innards in Rust. So long as Rust doesn't have a safe ABI, the upside of a Rust rewrite might be too low in terms of safety/security gained to be worth doing

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#65

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

pizlonator wrote: post #41
elteto wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As unsafe as C or C++. In fact, safer, because only the ABI surface is unsafe, the rust code behind it can be as safe or unsafe as you want it to be. I was addressing this portion of your comment: "C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge". If the C ABI is what enables software to get huge then Rust is already there. There is a second claim in your comment about a "safe ABI", bu…

Here's the problem. If you told me that you rebuilt the Linux userland with Rust but you used C ABI at all of the boundaries, then I would be pretty convinced that you did not create a meaningful improvement to security because of how many dynamic linking boundaries there are. So many of the libraries involved are small, and big or small they expose ABIs that involve pointers to buffers and manual memory management.…

The argument for unsafe ABI not being that big of a deal is that ABI boundaries often reflect organizational boundaries as well.

E.g. the kernel wouldn't really benefit from a "safe ABI" because users calling into the kernel need to be considered malicious by default.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#66

Post by pizlonator »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #59
pizlonator wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if Rust wants to evolve even more aggressively than C++ evolves, then that is a chasm that needs to be crossed. In lots of domains, having a language that doesn't change very much, or that only changes very carefully with backcompat being taken super seriously, is more important than the memory safety guarantees Rust offers.

C++ is still changing quite a lot though, just not in ways that fix the existing issues (often because doing so would break ABI stability).

That is a reason why a lot of folks stick with C.

In some sense, the chasm I'm describing hasn't been crossed by C++ yet

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#67

Post by themafia »

> Jon made the provocative comment that we needed to revisit our policy around having a small standard library. He’s not the first to say something like that, it’s something we’ve been hearing for years and years

It sounds to me like you "cross the chasm" a little too early. As a user I don't care about your "chasms" I care about high quality durable systems. This isn't the first time I've heard the "we'll change the std lib later" logic. I've yet to see it actually work.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#68

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #9
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #2

I've been a fan of all rust-based utilities that I've used. I am worried that 20+ (??) years of bug fixes and edge-case improvements can't be accounted for by simply using a newer/better code-base. A lot of bug fixes/exploits are _CAUSED_ by the C+ core, but still... Tried & true vs new hotness?

Don't hate me for this, but... is 20 years of Rust really new? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language) I do get what you mean, but Rust has been baking for a decade, finally took off after 10 years of baking, and now that is been repeatedly tried and tested it is eating the world, as some developers suggested it could eventually do so. I however do think this shows a different problem: If nobody wri…

But the 90s was only 20-years ago!

lol, you got me. Stupid old brain not calculating time correctly.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#69

Post by pizlonator »

duped wrote: post #63
pizlonator wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the problem. If you told me that you rebuilt the Linux userland with Rust but you used C ABI at all of the boundaries, then I would be pretty convinced that you did not create a meaningful improvement to security because of how many dynamic linking boundaries there are. So many of the libraries involved are small, and big or small they expose ABIs that involve pointers to buffers and manual memory management.…

How could a safe dynamic linking API ever work? I think you're moving the goalposts significantly here.

> How could a safe dynamic linking API ever work?

Fil-C solves it. I think Swift solves it, too.

So it's solvable.

No fundamental reason, that I know of, why Rust or any other safe language can't also have some kind of story here.

> I think you're moving the goalposts significantly here.

No. I'm describing a problem worth solving.

Also, I think a major chasm for Rust to cross is how defensive the community gets. It's important to talk about problems so that the problems can be solved. That's how stuff gets better.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#70

Post by pjmlp »

pizlonator wrote: post #13

Here's the chasm I want to see Rust cross: Dynamic linking with a safe ABI, where if you change and recompile one library then the outcome has to obey some definition of safety, and ABI stability is about as good as C or Objective-C or Swift. Until that happens, it'll be hard to adopt Rust in a lot of C/C++ strongholds where C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge.

Indeed, Victor Ciura from Microsoft DevDiv has several talks on how this is currently an adoption problem at Microsoft.

They have been working around it with DLLs, and COM/WinRT, but still the tooling isn't ideal.

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