[saywatnow]

This should be titled more honestly: perhaps something like "Case studies in rapidly replacing dangerous C parser code with Rust using nom".

The examples are interesting and well presented. But the first sections trying to put a veneer of respectability on rust-all-the-things were a bit rough and got my cynic sense tingling.

Yes, you believe Rust will produce better results: don't try to justify that with facts you don't have ("Several languages were tested .." bullshit, unless you show some data. Likewise the assertions about type-safety and no-GC being essential properties). The data you do have (implementations produced and integrated and tested in a paper-like time frame) are valuable, unfortunately they're cheapened/buried under this false veneer.

[geal]

We in fact tested multiple languages. I can even point you to various works done at the ANSSI like https://github.com/ANSSI-FR/bootcode_parser (python) or https://github.com/ANSSI-FR/caradoc (OCaml). I tried Haskell for VLC and it was not really suited for it (GC pauses in a synchronized media pipepline, and not meant to be called from C). But this was not a paper about comparing parser implementations.

Type-safety and lack of garbage collection are essential properties, could you tell me why you don't think that's the case?

Giving the reason for our language choice felt useful. Otherwise, it would have really looked like Rust developers steamrolling into projects :)