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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I'm waiting for a Rust version, mainly because of its stronger security but also because of the integration.

Edit: Of the JS engine which is now in C++; not sarcasm.

You can keep waiting, given that Google prefers to somehow mitigate C++ flaws than going through Chrome's version of Servo.

https://security.googleblog.com/2021/09/an-update-on-memory-...

> Even if we started writing new large components in Rust tomorrow, we’d be unlikely to eliminate a significant proportion of security vulnerabilities for many years. And can we make the language boundary clean enough that we can write parts of existing components in Rust? We don’t know yet. We’ve started to land limited, non-user-facing Rust experiments in the Chromium source code tree, but we’re not yet using it in production versions of Chrome - we remain in an experimental phase.

V8 compiles JavaScript into machine code, which is then executed. It is an inherently unsafe business to be in, while Rust might make it more safe it will never make it safe. Better to put that effort into better sandboxing, as that is the weakest link.

Just because the Rust code cannot be made "fully" safe doesn't mean it should be ruled out and replaced with sandboxing. For one, they can both be worked on, but it's also important to note that Rust can provide useful safety guarantees that are actually useful to have. For example, in C++ a linear overflow may end up leading to the ability to spray arbitrary shellcode, but in Rust you may be able to guarantee that any out-of-bounds accesses cannot be used to do this.

It would be so nice to have something like -fsafe instead of a myriad of mitigations, where the right defaults get enabled, but it will never happen.

By the way, the upcoming ARM conference has sessions regarding MTE.

Ever heard of a little project called Firefox? I hear they've been dipping their toes a little into the space of late.

Even Servo used a JS implementation written in C++ though.

Servo was a rendering engine project. They used an existing JS engine. Very different projects.

Rust version of what? V8, JS engine?

I think it's sarcasm, but rather hard to tell.

Are they rewriting V8 in rust?

Nope, https://security.googleblog.com/2021/09/an-update-on-memory-...

>Of the JS engine which is now in C++; not sarcasm.

Not gonna happen.

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