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One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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C is crap for anything where security matters. I'll happily take that debate with anyone who thinks differently.
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Agree. I'm an absolutely awesome software dev myself - and I know C by heart (being my favorite language after assembler). However, with age comes humility and the ability to recognize that I will write buggy code every now and then.
Better the language saves me when I can't, in security critical situations.
such a weird dichotomy in Windows – secure kernel space and privacy-nightmare user space … “we’re the only ones allowed to steal your data”
No idea what you’re being downvoted. Just take a look at all the critical CVSS scored vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel over the past decade. They’re all overwhelmingly due to pitfalls of the C language - they’re rarely architectural issues but instead because some extra fluff wasn’t added to double check the size of an int or a struct etc resulting in memory corruption. Use after frees, out of bounds reads, etc.
These are pretty much wiped out entirely by Rust and caught at compile time (or at runtime with a panic).
The cognitive load of writing safe C, and the volume of extra code it requires, is the problem of C.
You can write safe C, if you know what you’re doing (but as shown by the volume of vulns, even the world’s best C programmers still make slip ups).
Rust forces safe(r) code without any of the cognitive load of C and without having to go out of your way to learn it and religiously implement it.
They're being downvoted because it's a silly comment that is basically unrelated and also extremely unhelpful. Everyone can agree that C has footguns and isn't memory safe, but writing a kernel isn't memory safe. A kernel written in Rust will have tons of unsafe, just look at Redox: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aredox-os%2Fkernel%20unsafe&type=code That doesn't mean it isn't safer, even in kernel space, but the issues with introducing Rust into the kernel, which is already written in C and a massive project, are more nuanced than "C bad". The religious "C bad" and "C good" arguments are kinda exactly the issue on display in the OP.
I say this as someone who writes mostly Rust instead of C and is in favor of Rust in the kernel.
Oh no, i'm having a meltdown with all the cognitive load...
Build all the fancy tools you want. At the end of the day if you put a monkey at the wheel of a Ferrari you'll still have problems.
Nice that Rust is memory-safe, use it if you want, but why the insistence on selling Rust via C is crap? Doesn't earn you any points.
How about rustaceans fork the kernel and once it's fully Rust-only then try and get it to be used instead of the current one... win-win, eh?
I honestly like the cognitive load. Just not when I am at the workplace, having to deal with said load, with the office banter in the background and (not so) occasionally, being interrupted for other stuff.
And my cognitive load is not even about the memory allocations, most of the time.
Off topic:
I think, if one is seriously learning programming from a young age, it is better to start with C, make a project, big enough to feel the difficulty and understand what the cognitive load is all about and get used to it, hence increasing their mental capability. Then learn the memory safe language of their choice.
I never made a big enough project in C, but you can get to feel the load in C++ too.
I’m not insisting anything; stating C is not a memory-safe language isn’t a subjective opinion.
Note I’m not even a Rust fan; I still prefer C because it’s what I know. But the kernel isn’t written by a bunch of Lewis Hamiltons; so many patches are from one-time contributors and the kernel continues to get inundated with memory safety bugs that no amount of infrastructure, testing, code review, etc is catching. Linux is written by monkeys with a few Hamiltons doing their best to review everything before merging.
Linus has talked about this repeatedly over the past few years at numerous conferences and there’s a reason he’s integrating Rust drivers and subsystems (and not asking them to fork as you are suggesting) to stop the kernel stagnating and to begin to address the issues like one-off patches that aren’t maintained by their original author and to start squashing the volume of memory corruption bugs that are causing 2/3rds of the kernel’s vulnerabilities.
I'd say this is the issue to fix. It's not easy but if anything curl has proven it can be done efficiently.
Yeah, let's see what Bagder has to say about this:
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/12/13/making-it-harder-to-do-wrong/
My eyes are rolling onto the floor and down the stairs.