this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 124 points 10 months ago (14 children)

It’s always memory management

No wonder everyone's crazy about Rust.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 10 months ago (9 children)

It's certainly why it is being used to build browsers and OSs now. Those are places were memory management problems are a huge problem. It probably doesn't make sense for every match 3 game to be made in Rust, but when errors cause massive breaches or death, it's a lot safer than C++, taking human faulability into account.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (4 children)

What makes rust so resiliant against these types of atacks?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The short answer is Rust was built with safety in mind. The longer answer is C was built mostly to abstract from assembly without much thought to safety. In C, if you want to use an array, you must manually request a chunk of memory, check to make sure you are writing within the bounds of your array, and free up the memory used by your array when completely done using it. If you do not do those steps correctly, you could write to a null pointer, cause a buffer overflow error, a use-after-free error, or memory leak depending on what step was forgotten or done out of order. In Rust, the compiler keeps track of when variables are used through a borrowing system. With this borrowing system the Rust compiler requests and frees memory safely. It also checks array bounds at run-time without a programmer explicitly needing to code it in. Several high-level languages have alot of these safety features too. C# for example, can make sure objects are not freed until they fall out of scope, but it does this at run-time with a garbage collector where Rust borrower rules are done at compile-time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

C was built mostly to abstract from assembly

That’s actually not true; rather, many modern architectures are designed to allow languages like C to be compiled more easily. Old architectures don’t even have a built-in stack.

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