Re:Getting Past C
by Animats on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @07:33PM
(#13314647)
There's a lot more unsafe code in Rust crates than there should be. That's a fixable problem. Some stuff from the early days predates the optimizer getting smart enough that unsafe code isn't needed. I wrote on this a few days ago in a Rust topic.
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Re:Getting Past C
by Manishearth on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @09:02PM
(#13315082)
While I now mostly agree with you that there is more unsafe code than there should be, I still maintain that the frequency of unsafe in a deptree is usually still small enough to be practically auditable, ignoring FFI. It could/should be much less, but it's not too bad. I've done such audits a few times and it's not been too hard and taken very little time.
Auditing FFI is a whole other challenge, however :(
> I still maintain that the frequency of unsafe in a deptree is usually still small enough to be practically auditable
Not in binary libraries, hence why it is important to have a culture to only use unsafe if it really must be used.
Re:Getting Past C
by Manishearth on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @03:24PM
(#13321735)
Well, yeah, but you don't really download Rust binary libraries yet :)
You do have C libraries which you access through FFI. This is inevitably unsafe. We should be auditing more there. Though IMO it's still manageable, for most crates.
Re:Getting Past C
by staticassertion on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @09:51PM
(#13315289)
Hmmmm. Note to self - actually try to audit a reasonably sized project's unsafe code to see how reasonable it is.