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0 pointszamalek1y ago0 comments

> Memory safety is just one aspect

I feel as though not enough attention is given to how std is designed. For example: [u8], str, Path, and OsStr may be confusing at first, but when you understand why they are there any other approach feels icky. std guides you down a path of caring about things that really should matter (at least if you're only unwrapping provably safe values).

Have you considered what happens if not-utf8 data winds up in an environment variable that you are writing to stdout? What if it contains malicious VT commands?

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shiomiru1y ago

> Have you considered what happens if not-utf8 data winds up in an environment variable that you are writing to stdout? What if it contains malicious VT commands?

Unless you're talking about terminal bugs in parsing invalid UTF-8 - and parsing invalid UTF-8 is easier than rendering valid UTF-8 - VT commands are UTF-8 compatible. You just need to embed an ASCII escape character.

adgjlsfhk11y ago

yeah I think this is an area where rust (and python) just get it wrong. files, the Internet and input devices can all give you invalid Unicode. IMO it's better to have a primary string type that includes invalid Unicode since most algorithms will handle it correctly anyway, and the ones that won't can pretty clearly check and throw errors appropriately (especially since very few algorithms work correctly for all of Unicode in the first place)

dwattttt1y ago

There's a primary type that holds invalid utf8; it's [u8]. If you want a string from that, you try turn it into a string, and deal with the errors then.

If an algorithm works for invalid Unicode, it should probably be an algorithm on bytes, not strings.

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