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Comment by gautamcgoel | Hacker News Reader

Hi Drew, I agree with everything you said re complexity and rust. What we really need is a modernized C language, tools that help us catch bugs like this, and a better culture of testing and accountability.

I'm curious whether you run OpenBSD, since you mentioned you use doas. Do you have any thoughts on OpenBSD?

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Rust is modernized C. You are looking for something that already exists. If C programmers would be looking for tools to help catch bugs like this and a better culture of testing and accountability they would be using Rust.

Rust is modernized C++.

I really don't understand why people donvoted this despite it's obvious. I don't align with you on anything else bc I don't hate C++ and Rust but I have to admit Rust and C++ suffer from the same problems.

Yeah, Rust is about the simplest language that guarantees both memory safety + low-level control. Almost all of its complexity comes from having to satisfy both.

Modernizes C language = Zig.

But I don’t see a point in using systems languages for the usual UNIX tools, they could be rewritten in a more secure language. In the rare case performance is important, there is FFI, but they are usually IO-bound so there is not much point.

I agree about secure languages. Last week I was daydreaming about reimplementing all non-RT parts in Lua.

I don't run OpenBSD, for reasons that have little to do with security. In my opinon, OpenBSD is not agressive enough at complexity reduction (doas being an outlier, I think doas is quite a good size).

I see. What do you run, if you don't mind me asking?

Alpine Linux.

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