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laumars | 3 years ago

I was with you right up until “quietly doing it without much fanfare”.

Personal opinions of Rust aside, it has gained so much fanfare that “rewrite it Rust” is now practically a meme.

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bitexploder|3 years ago

The other side of that is the back end of what Rust folks are doing. There is a vocal segment that are doing a lot of surface level things. But there are also people quietly building the language and toolchain up to be something that you can do true low level embedded work with while maintaining (most of) the guarantees of Rust. That is what I was alluding to. I don't think "rewrite it in Rust" is always smart or even productive.

edit: It is also worth exploring why and how a systems programming language has generated this much excitement in folks that are "rewriting it in Rust". These people are also in their way making it that much easier for everyone else to transition to Rust, proving these projects work just fine in Rust. I do agree it is a meme, but it is a good one for us all. As an infosec practitioner nothing could make me happier than seeing people excited about a language that eradicates one of the worst and most pernicious classes of C/C++ bugs.

pjmlp|3 years ago

The sad part is that this was inflicted by the industry themselves,

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09/the_multics_o...

> The combination of BASED and REFER leaves the compiler to do the error prone pointer arithmetic while having the same innate efficiency as the clumsy equivalent in C. Add to this that PL/1 (like most contemporary languages) included bounds checking and the result is significantly superior to C.

pdimitar|3 years ago

It's not fair to judge an entire ecosystem full of extremely talented people by the vocal (and insufferable) 1%. Every group has them. What has become a meme has zero relationship to the quality of the thing.

laumars|3 years ago

I wasn’t judging anyone. I was just saying Rust isn’t exactly flying under the radar.