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0 pointsMaulingMonkey6y ago0 comments

> It shows that people are still struggling with changing the way in which they write software to the "rust" way.

It shows no such thing.

I generally work on relatively small ~1MLOC C++ codebases. There are codebases out there measured in the hundreds of MLOC. These are not the comparatively tiny javascript codebases you find React used in - where additional milliseconds of download / parse / evaluation time has a measurable effect on your user retention statistics. There is no "near instant" at 100M+ LOC scales. There is only incremental rewrites, and incremental rewrites means making your new code talk to your old code, and to other people's existing code.

This means interop with existing C ABIs. There is no such thing as a C "replacement" that can't talk to an existing C ABI, or expose an existing C ABI.

Of course, a C ABI doesn't mean C. It's more frequently C++ in my ecosystem, for example. But it could just as easily be Rust, or any number of other languages capable of exposing a C ABI.

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jonny3836y ago

>There are codebases out there measured in the hundreds of MLOC.

I agree with your argument, but I think in practice trying to "port" something with hundreds of MLOC is a losing battle (especially away from C). By the time you finished porting to rust (or your other language of the week), rust will likely have come and gone and will be been replaced by something either better or "better".

IMO people should spend less time trying to re-invent the wheel in rust and more time either improving C or the tooling / static analysis for C. It would avoid _so many_ of these issues.

MaulingMonkeyOP6y ago

I agree that porting 100MLOC is a losing battle no matter the language. And I'll concede I'm not certain Rust will have the staying power - although I hope it might.

And I'm all for more C tooling. Static analysis, fuzzing, sanitizers, valgrind, clang thread safety annotations, etc. are all wonderful tools I lean on heavily. But these are opt in, patchwork, platform specific, rife with false positives, false negatives, inconsistent, slow, painful to configure and use... I've wanted far more out of my C and C++ tooling than it's been able to give me for many years now. I'll frequently try out new attributes and annotations, only to curse when they fail to handle really trivial edge cases.

Meanwhile, Rust? It already catches things I didn't even realize I wanted to catch. Static checks opt-out into fast dynamic checks opt-out into heisenbugs in auditable unsafe blocks. The defaults are great.

I doubt C or C++'s tooling will reach the state of Rust, as frozen today, within the next decade. Smart people have tried long and hard to improve things, with quite middling results, convincing me it's a hard problem. I'm a bit more optimistic that it might catch up within the next century, but if I'm not long dead by then, I'll almost certainly be long retired. If it eventually does catch up, I suspect it'll have taken more than a few notes from Rust's approach.

I share your wariness of re-inventing the wheel, but the C & C++ static analysis ecosystem has left enough to be desired that I think it's warranted in this case. It's to rust's credit that they aren't re-inventing everything, and e.g. leverage LLVM for codegen, optimizations, debug info generation, etc.

pjmlp6y ago

Given the 30+ years of proven security exploits due to memory corruption, the C community has proven multiple times that it doesn't care about those solutions, except when required to do so in certified software.

That Solaris, iOS and in the future Android, pursue hardware memory tagging as workaround for memory corruption exploits, it is a proof how bad the situation in terms of security is.

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