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.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
205 points (92.9% liked)
Programming
17398 readers
122 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
Need more carrot
The US government has more pressing issues I think.
Maybe it can shut the fuck up an let me do my job in contrast to its judicial branch.
What if I told you the judicial branch is doing its job because it was always evil to begin with?
I would say you’re right
yeah No.
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.
Why the swipe at Linus? He's been supportive of rust in the Linux kernel.
they don't swipe him at all. I don't know why his picture is there
because that makes people click
load more comments
(7 replies)
well, i'm glad the US government is at least aware what C and C++ are!
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.
The comment thread in that article is interesting. Grep for Ada.
The US government hates anything that can perform math too fast.
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
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...
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.
load more comments
(8 replies)
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
"Oh, I thought I was coding in Python. Oops!"
Continues coding in C++
load more comments
(1 replies)
My friend from university sends me his Rust code snippets sometimes. Ngl it looks like a pretty cool language.
There was also that tldr reimplemention in Rust that is a gatrillion times faster than the original.
I really want to give it a try but I have executive dysfunction and don't have any ideas of what I could use it for.
The main issue I have with rust is the lack of a rust abi for shared libraries, which makes big dependencies shitty to work with. Another is a lot of the big, nearly ubiquitous libraries don't have great documentation, what's getting put up on crates.io is insufficient to quickly get an understanding of the library. It'd also be nice if the error messages coming out of rust analyzer were as verbose as what the compiler will give you. Other than that it's a really interesting language with a lot of great ideas. The iterator paradigm is really convenient, and the way enums work leads to really expressive code.
As someone that have worked in software for 30 years, and deplying complicated software, shared libraries is a misstake. You think you get the benefit of size and easy security upgrades, but due to deployment hell you end up using docker and now your deployment actually added a whole OS in size and you need to do security upgrades for this OS instead of just your application. I use rust for some software now, and I build it with musl, and is struck by how small things get in relation to the regular deployment, and it feels like magic that I no longer get glibc incompatibility issues.
Maybe for your use cases that's OK, but there are many situations where the size and ease of upgrading provided by shared libraries is worthwhile. For example it would suck to need to push a 40+ GB binary to a fleet of systems with a poor or unreliable internet connection. You could try to mitigate this sort of thing by splitting the application up into microservices, but that adds complexity, and isn't always a viable tradeoff if maximizing compute efficiency is also a concern.
I'm not so sure that dynamic libraries always reduces the size. Specially with libraries that are linked by a single binary.
With static libraries, you can conditionally compile only the features you're gonna use. With dynamic libraries, however, the whole library must be compiled.
EDIT: just to clarify, I'm not saying that static libraries result always in less size. I'm saying that it's not a black and white issue.
due to deployment hell you end up using docker
Maybe tackle that deployment hell instead of band-aiding it with docker?
load more comments
(1 replies)
Documentation is generally considered one of the stronger points of rust libraries. Crates.io is not a documentation site you want https://docs.rs/ for that though it is generally linked to on crates.io. A lot of bigger crates also have their own online books for more in depth stuff. It is not that common to find a larger crate with bad documentation.
One specific example I encountered was ndarray. I couldn't figure out how to make a function take an array and an arrayslice without rewriting the function for both types. This could be because I'm novice with the language, but it didn't seem obvious. I ended up giving up after trying to dig through the docs for a few hours and went back to C++.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Of course its rewrite is nearly infinitely faster than the original JavaScript.
oh
lol
didn't cross my mind that someone would make a CLI program in js
I mean, I've done it, but I am a registered dunce cap owner.
Well, so is that guy.
Rust is definitely a really cool language (as someone who has played with it just a little) but it's quite headache inducing, at least for me at the moment.
It has a steep learning curve, but it's super nice to use once you're over the initial bump
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I thought the US Government bought a lot of software in Ada, so I hope they continue with that.
load more comments
(1 replies)
To address this concern, CISA recommends that developers transition to memory-safe programming languages such as Rust, Java, C#, Go, Python, and Swift.
If only it were that easy to snap your fingers and magically transform your code base from C to Rust.
guy_butterfly_meme.jpg is this unbiased journalism?
load more comments
(3 replies)
lol ok.
view more: next ›