XCP-ng Initating Effort To Rewrite Xen Components In Rust

[patrick1946]

People is too sensitive these days. We should evaluate the language objectively independently of it's promoters.

I still remember the days of the netiquette. It was so much more pleasant and productive.

The term objectively is deeply rooted into metaphysics and only works if you can close a system. Even in physics it is hard. But how is that possible with something like a computer language? Maybe you can evaluate it economical but even that is very hard because you have to collect so much data. Computer languages are so context dependent that you can argue endlessly. ;-)

[ssokolow]

Plus, you have to recognize that a non-trivial slice of the people "pushing for Rust" are more just seeing Rust as the last building block needed to allow people to still see them as credible when they push against C, C++, or other languages that make memory-unsafety so easy.

For Android, the argument is "Rust or Java. Rust just allows us to broaden the rule we were already applying to more low-level components". The Chromium team wrote Safer Usage of C++ and Borrowing Trouble: The Difficulties Of A C++ Borrow-Checker about how much work they went through to make use of C++ safer and why it's still not enough. For parsers, Google was already experimenting with a compile-to-C language named WUFFS which enables guarantees even stricter than Rust at the expense of not being general-purpose. The NSA didn't argue for Rust specifically, but for ditching C and C++ in favour of memory-safe languages in general. etc. etc. etc.

[patrick1946]

Plus, you have to recognize that a non-trivial slice of the people "pushing for Rust" are more just seeing Rust as the last building block needed to allow people to still see them as credible when they push against C, C++, or other languages that make memory-unsafety so easy.

For Android, the argument is "Rust or Java. Rust just allows us to broaden the rule we were already applying to more low-level components". The Chromium team wrote Safer Usage of C++ and Borrowing Trouble: The Difficulties Of A C++ Borrow-Checker about how much work they went through to make use of C++ safer and why it's still not enough. For parsers, Google was already experimenting with a compile-to-C language named WUFFS which enables guarantees even stricter than Rust at the expense of not being general-purpose. The NSA didn't argue for Rust specifically, but for ditching C and C++ in favour of memory-safe languages in general. etc. etc. etc.

Yes but the examples are all systems with a large public interface or an OS. Not all of the programs have that. It got common with the advent of the web technologies. If you would not have this large public interface you would not get all the problems. Web technologies have efficiency problems too. As an user I avoid web apps like milk and I am lactose intolerant. ;-) They are slow, eat my battery and work very often not offline. Actually when I need them most. And they save the my data in cloud. That are problems no computer language can fix.

[ssokolow]

Yes but the examples are all systems with a large public interface or an OS. Not all of the programs have that. It got common with the advent of the web technologies. If you would not have this large public interface you would not get all the problems. Web technologies have efficiency problems too. As an user I avoid web apps like milk and I am lactose intolerant. ;-) They are slow, eat my battery and work very often not offline. Actually when I need them most. And they save the my data in cloud. That are problems no computer language can fix.

The problem is that more and more stuff that wasn't designed to have a web interface is being retrofitted to have it via things like WebUSB, WebGPU, etc. ...so it's becoming important that every library or platform API be designed with that potential future in mind. libstagefright (hardware-acceleratable audio/video) has historically been one of Android's most visible sources of vulnerabilities and it may predate the HTML5 audio and video tags. (It's been too long since I checked the timeline on that.)

[darkonix]

The term objectively is deeply rooted into metaphysics and only works if you can close a system.

I objectively define objectively as my objetive opinion. Naturally everyone else opinion is not objectively and need to acknowledge my objectively better judgement.