Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

Re:Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017) by simias on Sunday May 03, 2020 @11:32AM (#23059588)

I think Theo's reply was a bit excessive in some regards but I can also understand him being frustrated when you've been working on a very complex project for decades and somebody comes around and say "uh, why don't you rewrite it in <hype new language>?".

It's seldom a very interesting or constructive discussion. If you think Rust has something to bring to some project then you should at least take the time to write a decent proof of concept or something similar, not ask the current maintainers to rewrite their codebase in Rust/Go/Haskell/Prolog because of some purely theoretical benefits. You don't go to construction workers in the street and tell them that they should consider using different types of hammers.

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Re:Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017) by empath75 on Sunday May 03, 2020 @11:45AM (#23059693)

I don’t think Linux or bsd will ever be rewritten in rust nor should they. I do think eventually there will be an os written in rust that surpasses them in popularity, but probably on the time frame of decades.

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Re:Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017) by qznc on Sunday May 03, 2020 @01:55PM (#23060672)

There are not many CVEs for coreutils anyways: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/5075/GNU-Coreutils.html?v...

To improve security, Rust should probably aim to replace libjpeg and other stuff which deals with malicious data a lot.

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Re:Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017) by saagarjha on Sunday May 03, 2020 @05:59PM (#23062194)

coreutils are often run on untrusted data.

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Re:Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017) by m4r35n357 on Sunday May 03, 2020 @11:41AM (#23059661)

I think he was very polite.

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Re:Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017) by simias on Sunday May 03, 2020 @12:42PM (#23060104)

I didn't mean to imply that he was rude, merely that his dismissal went a bit too far. He threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. In particular this bit:

>As a general trend the only things being written in these new languages are new web-facing applications, quite often proprietory or customized to narrow roles. Not Unix parts.

This doesn't really match what I saw of the Rust ecosystem and, even if it did, being able to write proprietary web-facing apps doesn't preclude one from writing "Unix parts". It's as if I said that C++ couldn't be used to write Unix utilities because it's used to write proprietary videogames. It's not a very good argument IMO.

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