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dbmikus | 11 months ago

If the goal is safety, rewriting ancient battle-tested software is not the way to do it.

The Lindy Effect for software: the longer software appears to be bug-free, the more likely it is bug-free.

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jorvi|11 months ago

With how often severe CVEs pop up years or even decades later, that is an unwise line of thinking.

In 2020, iOS suffered a zero day exploit based on font library code from the 90s. A bug that sat dormant for 30 years.

As far as rewriting / rethinking core utilities, I'm glad that for example `doas` and `sudo-rs` exist to beef up root authentication.

https://googleprojectzero.github.io/0days-in-the-wild/0day-R...

N2yhWNXQN3k9|11 months ago

True, but there is no reason that those battle-tested cases cannot be migrated into other projects by a mindful maintainer / author (not to say that language-specific issues cannot arise, yet rust vs C seems like a pond vs ocean scenario).