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One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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C is crap for anything where security matters. I'll happily take that debate with anyone who thinks differently.
No idea what you’re being downvoted. Just take a look at all the critical CVSS scored vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel over the past decade. They’re all overwhelmingly due to pitfalls of the C language - they’re rarely architectural issues but instead because some extra fluff wasn’t added to double check the size of an int or a struct etc resulting in memory corruption. Use after frees, out of bounds reads, etc.
These are pretty much wiped out entirely by Rust and caught at compile time (or at runtime with a panic).
The cognitive load of writing safe C, and the volume of extra code it requires, is the problem of C.
You can write safe C, if you know what you’re doing (but as shown by the volume of vulns, even the world’s best C programmers still make slip ups).
Rust forces safe(r) code without any of the cognitive load of C and without having to go out of your way to learn it and religiously implement it.
Oh no, i'm having a meltdown with all the cognitive load...
Build all the fancy tools you want. At the end of the day if you put a monkey at the wheel of a Ferrari you'll still have problems.
Nice that Rust is memory-safe, use it if you want, but why the insistence on selling Rust via C is crap? Doesn't earn you any points.
How about rustaceans fork the kernel and once it's fully Rust-only then try and get it to be used instead of the current one... win-win, eh?
Yes a monkey. All the vulnerabilities that have happened over the decades are just bad c programmers. So the question is are there any good c programmers?
It's not just about bad/good C programmers. It's also about how much of the context, the given C programmer has read to make sure they know enough of what they are doing.
No matter how good one is at Programming, they need to make sure to read and remember what is happening in relevant parts of code, while making their one off contribution.
That's where the part of "leaving it to the computer" comes in. Hence, the usefulness of code checkers and even better if the compiler itself enforces the stuff. As long as the rules are good enough.
Let's just hope we are not jumping to another language 20 years down the line.
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