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Comment by jart | Hacker News Reader

But languages like C / C++ don't claim to be safe.

Even Rust doesn't claim to be "safe" without a qualifier. From the website:

> Rust’s rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety — enabling you to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time.

Note that it explicitly mentions "memory" safety and "thread" safety, which has a specific but reasonable definition in Rust (for example, memory safety doesn't cover physical memory leak). Also it explicitly mentions which portion of Rust is responsible for such guarantees, namely "type system" and "ownership model", and it is reasonably claimed that the ideal implementation of both will indeed completely achieve such guarantees. To be clear, the current implementation is also very close to that ideal to make such claim meaningful, but there is always a difference between the ideal and the practice.

Then they should say "we're researching how to create a memory safe language" or "we've built a memory-safer language" rather than saying what they're saying.

If you like a pedantry, yeah. But it helps to know that almost everyone else don't like that pedantry.

I agree with jart on this. Rust has gained a reputation for overzealous marketing (also called evangelism), and we who like and use Rust should do everything possible to reverse that reputation, by being honest, even to a fault, about known limitations.

Don't get me wrong, I too agree on your sentiment (even though technically it wasn't a Rust's own fault), but I also believe that jart's claim was something else and a comparison with academic paper should be sufficient to show that.

By that standard, no general-use programming language (even eg Python or Java) could ever be called "memory-safe". That level of pedantry is occasionally necessary, but not usually useful. In practice, I'd confidently wager the vast majority of Rust programmers have never encountered a soundness bug in the core language when not specifically hunting for one (I certainly haven't).

I'd wager the vast majority of Linux users have never encountered a memory safety issue with the Kernel. Memory safety issues are usually rare enough in world class C code that, by the time it reaches end-users, you have to actively go out of your way to exploit it.

Rust built its reputation around the idea that they can crush security bugs by making them impossible. They should be holding themselves to a higher standard than that "in practice" leeway. If a malicious actor can tease Rust into behaving in a way that contradicts its safety guarantees, then it could be serious.

Maybe your corporate policy is to configure Rust to allow zero unsafe code. Some crate you're depending on gets hijacked. It uses the cve-rs to crash your system even though Rust says it's 100% safe code.

The concept of safety is pretty different in a kernel and in a programming language. The kernel can be attacked directly with malicious calls, while it's the program created by the rust compiler that can be attacked (unless you envision Rust as a sandboxing technology, what it is absolutely not).

The safety in a programming language is mostly protecting the programmer against itself. The probability for a programmer to write this kind of code by mistake is close to zero, as opposed to UB in C or C++ that are pretty common. To make a vulnerable program with this kind of issue, the programmer would have to make them on purpose, what is unlikely unless for this kind of joke repository.

> I'd wager the vast majority of Linux users have never encountered a memory safety issue with the Kernel.

Yes, because they were caught in review and tests, or were patched in a bugfix release before being widely exploited. Rust catches safety issues during compilation, before you test or commit.

> Some crate you're depending on gets hijacked

Rust's safety is meant to protect against a certain class of programmer mistakes. You still need to audit your dependencies and sandbox untrusted code; the language designers have never claimed otherwise.

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