Hacker News Reader

No, they're different things. Correctness is nice, but it's much more important to me that my software doesn't let some bad person take over my computer than it is that my software works perfectly all the time. If I can get both at a reasonable cost, I'll take both, of course. But I'll settle for safety.

View on HN

In something like a TCP/IP stack correctness is strongly related to safety. For example, it could be perfectly memory safe, but deliver packets to the wrong address, allow other programs to read all traffic, or allow easy denial-of-service attacks.

I realise we didn't define "safe" before we started, but I didn't just mean memory safety. Agreed that all of your examples would be incorrect, I'd just also term all of them as also unsafe.

An example of something that's incorrect but not unsafe would be, say, an error which would occasionally corrupt random TCP packets causing checksums to fail and the packets to be retransmitted. It's not working how it should, but it's not compromising your system's security or your data's safety (at least I don't think it is).

Just use C or C++ with testing, fuzzing, sanitizers. It will probably be done before an equivalent Rust project compiles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com