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That comment is definitely out of line and trolling, but the author's attitude towards safety and security is still incredibly bad. Two wrongs don't make a righ

That comment is definitely out of line and trolling, but the author's attitude towards safety and security is still incredibly bad. Two wrongs don't make a right. I'm dismayed to see more new languages copying the safety and security features of C (i.e. nothing).

ddevault 4y ago
Hare has significantly more safety and security features than C. Bounds-checked slices, no uninitialized data, mandatory error handling, nullable pointer types, and others still. What it lacks that Rust users object to is a borrow checker.
- CJefferson 4y ago
  You don't need a borrow checker -- there are many ways to avoid use-after-free bugs. They don't in Java, or Haskell, or Python, to name 3 languages I work in sometimes. However, I really do think for a new "systems language" nowadays, you do want to look at how major security holes occur in practice, and have a good story on how users should avoid them.
  - ddevault 4y ago
    We do take security pretty seriously with Hare. To quote our crypto module's introduction as an example: > Cryptography is a difficult, high-risk domain of programming. The life and well-being of your users may depend on your ability to implement cryptographic applications with due care. Please carefully read all of the documentation, double-check your work, and seek second opinions and independent review of your code. Our documentation and API design aims to prevent easy mistakes from being made, but it is no substitute for a good background in applied cryptography. We have many safety features built into the language and the standard library is designed to be difficult to use incorrectly. I will address these concerns directly in a subsequent blog post covering the safety and security features of Hare. The main problem is that some programmers view anything less than what Rust provides as morally unjustified.
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      Because rust inherently treats humans as fallible to a large extent. Which all of us are. That introduction is simply an appeal to "I can write safe correct C." with more words. Which obviously is not true.
      - jupp0r 4y ago
        Rust has compile time checks that avoid one category of bugs out of many. It’s “safe” in a very narrow sense.
        cyber_kinetist 4y ago
        And that category of bugs (memory safety) is only avoidable if the unsafe code itself doesn't have undefined behavior (which responsibility is left to the programmer rather than the compiler). If unsafe code is compromised then it's still game over (hence the recent development of various tools/methods like Stacked Borrows in MIRI that checks potential errors outside the borrow checker, as well as various guidelines for developers to write safer unsafe code) Safe Rust cannot ever cause undefined behavior, but Unsafe Rust can. The ultimate merit of Rust is that when you suspect any undefined behavior you only need to check the unsafe part, which is a much smaller percentage of your codebase (as opposed to C/C++ where you need to check the entirety of your code)
        uecker 4y ago
        It is not enough to check your unsafe code for UB, you also need to make sure it does not violate the invariants Rust relies on to prove the safe code safe.
        staticassertion 4y ago
        ???? Whatever that means lol You mean the borrow checker? People are working on formally proving that, and have already done so for large subsets of the language.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    > Java, or Haskell, or Python These are all GC'd languages that run bytecode on an abstract virtual machine. They avoid use-after-free by just not-freeing, if necessary at the cost of leaking unbounded amounts of memory. This doesn't invalidate the point that borrowing isn't the only way to solve this problem, but there are definitely classes of these bugs for which Rust's borrow checker is the only known production-ready solution that still has manual, deterministic memory management.
    - 4ad 4y ago
      Your point about GC stands, but I will note that Haskell is a compiled language.
      - eatonphil 4y ago
        And Go and native-image (GraalVM Java compiler) and Poly/ML (on x86) and MLton and OCaml (on x86) and Chicken Scheme and SBCL (and ECL).
- throwaway82652 4y ago
  You should be implementing a borrow checker or something like it. It's irresponsible not to do that. I'm serious about this. We know how to totally stop most use-after-free bugs during static analysis now, this is a tool that can be implemented in any language, so people should just do it. If you ask me the status quo moved a long time ago. This has nothing to do with Rust. Also I was wrong before and you were out of line. Matthew wasn't trolling, he never said you should be held criminally liable. You just made that criminal part up for no reason. Anyone should be held socially liable and shamed if their project has bad security and they refuse to fix it after they knew about it. I think you would even agree with that.
mplanchard 4y ago
I think “incredibly bad” is overstating things quite a bit. Safety isn’t an all-or-nothing game. If it were, Rust would be useless because it’s not Ada or another formally verifiable language.

ddevault 4y ago

Hare has significantly more safety and security features than C. Bounds-checked slices, no uninitialized data, mandatory error handling, nullable pointer types, and others still. What it lacks that Rust users object to is a borrow checker.

CJefferson 4y ago
You don't need a borrow checker -- there are many ways to avoid use-after-free bugs. They don't in Java, or Haskell, or Python, to name 3 languages I work in sometimes. However, I really do think for a new "systems language" nowadays, you do want to look at how major security holes occur in practice, and have a good story on how users should avoid them.
- ddevault 4y ago
  We do take security pretty seriously with Hare. To quote our crypto module's introduction as an example: > Cryptography is a difficult, high-risk domain of programming. The life and well-being of your users may depend on your ability to implement cryptographic applications with due care. Please carefully read all of the documentation, double-check your work, and seek second opinions and independent review of your code. Our documentation and API design aims to prevent easy mistakes from being made, but it is no substitute for a good background in applied cryptography. We have many safety features built into the language and the standard library is designed to be difficult to use incorrectly. I will address these concerns directly in a subsequent blog post covering the safety and security features of Hare. The main problem is that some programmers view anything less than what Rust provides as morally unjustified.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    Because rust inherently treats humans as fallible to a large extent. Which all of us are. That introduction is simply an appeal to "I can write safe correct C." with more words. Which obviously is not true.
    - jupp0r 4y ago
      Rust has compile time checks that avoid one category of bugs out of many. It’s “safe” in a very narrow sense.
      - cyber_kinetist 4y ago
        And that category of bugs (memory safety) is only avoidable if the unsafe code itself doesn't have undefined behavior (which responsibility is left to the programmer rather than the compiler). If unsafe code is compromised then it's still game over (hence the recent development of various tools/methods like Stacked Borrows in MIRI that checks potential errors outside the borrow checker, as well as various guidelines for developers to write safer unsafe code) Safe Rust cannot ever cause undefined behavior, but Unsafe Rust can. The ultimate merit of Rust is that when you suspect any undefined behavior you only need to check the unsafe part, which is a much smaller percentage of your codebase (as opposed to C/C++ where you need to check the entirety of your code)
        uecker 4y ago
        It is not enough to check your unsafe code for UB, you also need to make sure it does not violate the invariants Rust relies on to prove the safe code safe.
        staticassertion 4y ago
        ???? Whatever that means lol You mean the borrow checker? People are working on formally proving that, and have already done so for large subsets of the language.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  > Java, or Haskell, or Python These are all GC'd languages that run bytecode on an abstract virtual machine. They avoid use-after-free by just not-freeing, if necessary at the cost of leaking unbounded amounts of memory. This doesn't invalidate the point that borrowing isn't the only way to solve this problem, but there are definitely classes of these bugs for which Rust's borrow checker is the only known production-ready solution that still has manual, deterministic memory management.
  - 4ad 4y ago
    Your point about GC stands, but I will note that Haskell is a compiled language.
    - eatonphil 4y ago
      And Go and native-image (GraalVM Java compiler) and Poly/ML (on x86) and MLton and OCaml (on x86) and Chicken Scheme and SBCL (and ECL).
throwaway82652 4y ago
You should be implementing a borrow checker or something like it. It's irresponsible not to do that. I'm serious about this. We know how to totally stop most use-after-free bugs during static analysis now, this is a tool that can be implemented in any language, so people should just do it. If you ask me the status quo moved a long time ago. This has nothing to do with Rust. Also I was wrong before and you were out of line. Matthew wasn't trolling, he never said you should be held criminally liable. You just made that criminal part up for no reason. Anyone should be held socially liable and shamed if their project has bad security and they refuse to fix it after they knew about it. I think you would even agree with that.

mplanchard 4y ago

I think “incredibly bad” is overstating things quite a bit. Safety isn’t an all-or-nothing game. If it were, Rust would be useless because it’s not Ada or another formally verifiable language.