Item — HN Reader

Rust is not a lot better than C. In many aspect, it is worse. It is better if you focus on a specific point (memory safety) and exaggerate its importance beyond all other considerations and ignoring all other options to make progress in this area. This is the zealotry part.

For my personal IT security, people pushing Rust made things worse not better as I do not get security updates for parts of my OS (Debian) anymore. Also the supply chain risks in the Rust ecosystem are worrying. So even if you go the overall topic security rather than just memory safety, the situation is not all that clear anymore.

It is, of course, in the best interest of Google and co., who are in the business of putting spyware and locked-down content-distribution systems in everybody's pocket, to fully focus on memory safety. Not so much for the free software community where supply chain, long-term maintenance, and the health of existing projects and communities are more important.

And just to preempt the argument "but the superior type system will make everything better". I also was super excited about type system in my youth. I get why people are exited about this. But with experience I realized this also fairly easy to overestimate the impact of this (as I did myself). I also think that Rust is somewhat poorly designed in this regard compared to what is possible here, and adopting it makes it harder to adopt truly better techniques.

1 comments

> Rust is not a lot better than C.

Yes it is.

> In many aspect, it is worse.

"Many"? Compilation time sure. That's about it. Anyway things don't have to be pareto better to be better. A car is better than a horse, even though it can't travel over rough terrain as easily.

> It is better if you focus on a specific point (memory safety) and exaggerate its importance beyond all other considerations and ignoring all other options to make progress in this area. This is the zealotry part.

Memory safety is far from its only advantage over C. The fact that you think that is a strong signal you haven't ever seriously tried it.

> Also the supply chain risks in the Rust ecosystem are worrying.

What language is xz written in again?

> I also think that Rust is somewhat poorly designed in this regard compared to what is possible here

I disagree. Sure there are fancier type systems (Idris, Haskell, etc.), but they also have downsides. In any case we're comparing C and Rust. Rust is clearly way ahead of Rust. Your argument is "washing machines aren't better than hand washing because they don't also fold your clothes!"

The aspects where I think Rust is worse are: compilation time, high complexity, less stable, only one implementation, no international standard, no proper ABI.

xz was a highly sophisticated attack using social engineering and hiding malware in build artifacts, and it was found just in time. It has nothing to do with languages (it was not obfuscated C or something), but highlights that one has to carefully protect the supply chain. There were several compromised packages in cargo already, Rustup teaches people to do curl | sh.