• rational_lib@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • ulterno@programming.dev
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      13 hours ago

      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.

    • MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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

  • riodoro1@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Because they want to replace them with more corporate-controlled languages.

    Just add @safe: after your module declaration, and you’ll be safe by default if you don’t want to wait until D3.

    Also, unlike in Rust, you can opt-out from RAII with int foo = void;, although it primarily has a performance advantage with arrays, not singleton variables (might be also useful for aquiring an RNG seed in a dumb way).

    • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Jep, you got em, it’s all a conspiracy so they poison our mind with the evil tongues and make us corpo slaves with the help of Rust.

  • Solemarc@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

  • tourist@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      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.

      • snaggen@programming.dev
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        3 days ago

        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.

        • ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works
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          2 days ago

          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.

          • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            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.

        • 0x0@programming.dev
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          3 days ago

          due to deployment hell you end up using docker

          Maybe tackle that deployment hell instead of band-aiding it with docker?

          • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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            2 days ago

            He is. By using statically linked binaries.

            Technically this is conflating two things: bundling dependencies and static/dynamic linking. But since you have to bundle your dependencies to use static linking, and there’s little point dynamic linking if you bundle your dependencies… most of the time they are synonymous.

            Exceptions are things like plugins, but that’s pretty rare.

      • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Why not just use the C ABI?

        And what libraries are you referring to? Almost all the ones I’ve used have fantastic docs.

          • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            You can just use an unsafe block though. Or make a thin wrapper that is just safe functions that inside just have an unsafe block with the C ABI function.

            Even if rust had a stable ABI, you would still need that unsafe block.

      • nous@programming.dev
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        3 days ago

        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.

        • ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day ago

          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++.

    • Kacarott@aussie.zone
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      3 days ago

      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.

        • Kacarott@aussie.zone
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          2 days ago

          Mostly the ownership model, trying to remember which functions expect borrowed types or not, etc.

          The error messages in rust are really good, so I can usually make the code work quickly, but I need to properly understand the reason behind the error in order to learn, so that’s when I get headaches

  • JakenVeina@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    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.