• @[email protected]
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    125 months ago

    Because they want to replace them with more corporate-controlled languages.

    Just add @safe: after your module declaration, and you’ll be safe by default if you don’t want to wait until D3.

    Also, unlike in Rust, you can opt-out from RAII with int foo = void;, although it primarily has a performance advantage with arrays, not singleton variables (might be also useful for aquiring an RNG seed in a dumb way).

    • UnfortunateShort
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      145 months ago

      Jep, you got em, it’s all a conspiracy so they poison our mind with the evil tongues and make us corpo slaves with the help of Rust.

  • @[email protected]
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    5 months ago

    Eventually, painfully, slowly, we’ll move to memory-safe languages. It really is a good idea. Personally, though, I don’t expect it to happen this decade. In the 2030s? Yes, 2020s? No.

    This. Unless the government starts introducing fines or financial incentives (like fines) to force the use of memory-safe languages, ain’t nothing gonna happen.

    Anti Commercial-AI license

  • @[email protected]
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    855 months ago

    I don’t get why we’re taking a swing at Linus here. The article only mentions him in relation to the rust for Linux project being slow going. But, it IS going and the US government has only stated that “you need a plan to move to a memory safe language by 2025 or you might be liable if something bad happens as a result of the classics (use after free/double free/buffer overflow/etc.)” but I don’t think Linux would count it’s free software and it does have a plan.

  • @[email protected]
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    135 months ago

    I thought the US Government bought a lot of software in Ada, so I hope they continue with that.

        • Captain Aggravated
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          65 months ago

          I do know that Linus is on record with low opinion of C++. I have heard of him compare the cult-like following Rust has with the whole Vim/Emacs tribalism thing.

          • @[email protected]
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            155 months ago

            I have heard of him compare the cult-like following Rust has with the whole Vim/Emacs tribalism thing.

            Heh.

            I do think the worst thing going for Rust, right now, is the Rust community.

            It feels like few specific jackasses from the Java community made the jump to Rust, and no one had the sense to slap them with a newspaper.

              • @[email protected]
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                5 months ago

                Can you be more specific?

                Sure.

                I’ve had discussions about my impression that Rust’s build chain can be a bit surly compared to other popular languages.

                I don’t particularly mean it as a criticism - of course Rust’s security enforcement comes with more warnings and errors.

                But the novel part of the interactions, for me, was Rust community members coming at me with ‘well get gud, newbie’.

                These interactions are particularly ironic, given my experiences and specialties. I’m an old school veteran software developer. I have spent over half of my career in dedicated Cybersecurity roles.

                These conversations converted me from a mildly interested Rust proponent into a casual Rust critic.

          • @[email protected]
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            235 months ago

            I didn’t understand this. He said the bickering between C and rust devs reminds him of the vim/emacs debate.

  • @[email protected]
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    915 months ago

    If only it were that easy to snap your fingers and magically transform your code base from C to Rust. Spoiler alert: It’s not.

    How utterly disingenuous. That’s not what the CISA recommendation says, at all.

  • @[email protected]
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    65 months ago

    Imagine if there was a hack so bad that it caused everyone to become unable to develop in C and C++.

    Classic “let’s just make the cure worse than the disease” mindset among security enthusiasts.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      Imagine if there was a hack so bad that it caused everyone to become unable to develop in C and C++.

      Well, there is one that will imply you can only develop using anything that you have bootstrapped yourself, using hardware that you have designed and manufactured yourself, using tools that you have designed and manufactured yourself, using tools that you have designed and manufactured yourself …

      … with your own bare hands.

    • @[email protected]
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      145 months ago

      I don’t think those are the problem, but rather how they are used. And in case of managed languages like C#, it’s almost impossible to shoot yourself in the foot when it comes to memory management. You still can, if you really wish, but you have to be very explicit in that. 🤷‍♂️

    • @[email protected]
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      175 months ago

      AFAIK, the first one was written in LISP.

      The one most people push around here was written in Rust. It’s a really great language to write memory managers anyway.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      Who cares? Just like most things your average programmer relies on, they are written by smarter or at least more specialised people to make your job easier. They have learned to write memory-safe code so you don’t have to.

      • @[email protected]
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        125 months ago

        More specialized is critical.

        You have to understand your domain, what your goal is, how much time and money you have, etc.

    • @[email protected]
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      325 months ago

      God, this old argument… Careful, it’s an antique.

      The idea is to minimize memory management and have people who are experts on it deal with it.

    • @[email protected]
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      15 months ago

      Thanks, lol. I hope they realize soon that Rust is not forced to be used. Also the US government didn’t even talk about Rust only, but memory safe languages and listed Rust as an example.

    • @[email protected]
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      55 months ago

      As someone who learned Ada for a defense job years ago, I’ve been wondering how long it was going to take until I saw others comparing Rust to it, both in the sense of the language “safety” goals and the USG pushing for it.

      While the rust compiler is leagues better than any Ada compiler I ever had the misfortune of dealing with, the day to day pain that Rust incurs will probably always be a thorn in it’s side

  • @[email protected]
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    795 months ago

    But there is context to it:

    The report on Product Security Bad Practices warns software manufacturers about developing “new product lines for use in **service of critical infrastructure or [national critical functions] **NCFs in a memory-unsafe language (eg, C or C++) where there are readily available alternative memory-safe languages that could be used is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety.”

    It’s for new products that are very important to critical infrastructure and need to be safe as possible. The article writer seem not to be aware of this context:

    Take Rust in Linux, for example. Even with support from Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds, Rust is moving into Linux at a snail’s pace.

    Because Linux is the biggest software in the entire world and they do lot of stuff their own way. Rust is integrated slowly for future new projects. It makes sense to move in snail pace. The government doesn’t suggest the Linux project to stop using C entirely. The government “recommends” to start new projects in memory safe languages, if it is a critical software. That makes sense to me.

    You see, people who’ve spent years and sometimes decades mastering C don’t want to master the very different Rust. They don’t see the point.

    No, totally wrong. C programmers in Linux do not NEED to learn or master Rust. They just need to cooperate. The problem is, that some C programmers refuse to cooperate with Rust. They just want Rust to disappear. That has nothing to do with mastering the language. They refuse to make changes to their C code, so it can cooperate with Rust code via bindings.

    After all, they can write memory-safe code in C, so why can’t you?

    Nonsense argument, and false too. If that was the case, why do we have memory safe languages? Clearly people make mistake, old and new. Besides Linux is not the only software in the world.

    Converting existing large codebases to memory-safe languages can be an enormous undertaking.

    Nobody says old code should be rewritten in Rust. Neither the government, nor the Rust programmers in Linux suggest that. It’s not about rewriting code in memory-safe languages, its about new projects.

    Either this article is a misrepresentation or misunderstanding. Or I misunderstand the article or government. I don’t know anymore…

    • @[email protected]
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      15 months ago

      Take Rust in Linux, for example. Even with support from Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds, Rust is moving into Linux at a snail’s pace.

      Because Linux is the biggest software in the entire world and they do lot of stuff their own way. Rust is integrated slowly for future new projects. It makes sense to move in snail pace. The government doesn’t suggest the Linux project to stop using C entirely. The government “recommends” to start new projects in memory safe languages, if it is a critical software. That makes sense to me.

      Doubly so… Don’t care what the language is, or what the advantages are… Even if there’s a considerable security advantage to a new language… There’s no such thing as a language that’s advantages outweigh the security risks of rushed development to convert decades of tested code.

      • @[email protected]
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        15 months ago

        There’s no such thing as a language that’s advantages outweigh the security risks of rushed development to convert decades of tested code.

        Who said or suggested that anyway? Other than bringing this up now. Who says to convert decades of tested code to rushed code of new language?? Do people read the stuff before they reply?

    • @[email protected]
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      75 months ago

      No, totally wrong. C programmers in Linux do not NEED to learn or master Rust. They just need to cooperate. The problem is, that some C programmers refuse to cooperate with Rust. They just want Rust to disappear. That has nothing to do with mastering the language. They refuse to make changes to their C code, so it can cooperate with Rust code via bindings.

      I would argue that’s not the biggest problem, the biggest problem is that for you to refactor a function to work with rust, you need to refactor all the subsystems that rely on that function, and that take time, and you need to explain for the C dev why it need to be done, try to explain that for the amount of C devs in the kernel

    • @[email protected]
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      365 months ago

      They refuse to make changes to their C code, so it can cooperate with Rust code via bindings.

      I don’t even think the rust devs where asking for that. They are refusing changes by rust devs that help with rust while making the c code clearer and even refuse to answer questions about the semantics behind the c code. At least as far as I can see from the outside.

      • @[email protected]
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        105 months ago

        The Rust kernel devs are …

        1. …asking the maintainers to lock down APIs which the C devs purposefully leave malleable, in part, to avoid binary blob drivers being feasible.
        2. …asking maintainers to accept code into their subsystem whilst being told, you don’t need to know Rust to an expert level…trust us. Cross language interfaces always have nuance and make good attack vectors. Understandable that maintainers are cautious.
        3. …creating quite a lot of hassle for no a lot of improvement. Systems are only as resilient as their weakest components. The cross language interface is always going to be weak. Introducing a weakness to get improvements probably only succeeds at making the whole weaker.
        • @[email protected]
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          265 months ago

          asking the maintainers to lock down APIs which the C devs purposefully leave malleable, in part, to avoid binary blob drivers being feasible.

          No, they were asking them to define the semantics of the filesystem APIs. Those semantics are not encoded in the C API but the Rust devs wanted to encode them in the Rust API to avoid making mistakes.

          The C devs didn’t want to, not because of concerns about binary drivers, but because the semantics are already broken. Apparently different filesystem drivers assume different semantics for the same functions and it’s a whole mess. They don’t want to face up to this and certainly don’t want anyone pointing it out, so clearly it must be the Rust devs’ fault for wanting APIs to have consistent semantics.

          The rest of your comment is nonsense.

        • lad
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          65 months ago

          What’s the reason to avoid binary blob drivers being feasible? Is that about not being able to use non-free binary blobs in kernel? I don’t quite understand what it even is about

            • lad
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              15 months ago

              Got it. I agree that their drivers are (were?) of exemplary bad quality

              But I don’t think that it is realistically possible to drop all the proprietary firmware blobs, and if it’s not maybe it’s better to not actively sabotage something to ‘avoid those being feasible’?

              • @[email protected]
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                25 months ago

                Firmware don’t link to the kernel tho, and the kernel functions aren’t stable so a firmware today would stop working tomorrow because a function was refactored(and all the code in the kernel that depend on that function) for performance or security, and the binary can’t be refactored so it become useless

        • @[email protected]
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          35 months ago

          IIRC They were also trying to get kernel devs to let official structure definitions live in Rust instead of C, and got upset when they didn’t want to do that.

          • Pup Biru
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            115 months ago

            the rust devs wanted to CREATE official structure definitions that don’t exist in C so that there was more semantic meaning to the APIs