145
C++ creator rebuts White House warning
(www.infoworld.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
145 points (92.9% liked)
Programming
17314 readers
92 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's also a fallacy that rust code is memory safe. I audited a couple of large rust projects and found that they both had tens of unsafe constructs. I presume other projects are similar.
You can't use "unsafe" and then claim that your program's memory safe. It may be "somewhat safe-ish" but claiming that your code is safe because you carefully reviewed your unsafe sections leaves you on the same shaky ground as c++, where they also claim that they carefully review their code.
I don't have the data, but I don't think it's wild to assume that most rust programs have 0-1 unsafe blocks, in total. Except for special cases like ffi.
Even if your rust project has 1000s of unsafe blocks, it is still safer than C++, which is 100% an unsafe block. You only have to carefully review the parts marked "unsafe", in C++ you have to carefully review the whole code.
Also, because unsafe blocks are explicitly declared, you know which parts of the code require extra carefulness, and if you encounter a memory bug, doing Ctrl+F "unsafe" will soon show the root cause.
Yes, that's the difference between "safer" and "actually safe".