Gitoxide: Pure Rust Implementation of Git

Re:Gitoxide: Pure Rust Implementation of Git by amelius on Thursday August 13, 2020 @05:35AM (#24141496)

I think garbage collected languages like Haskell actually provide better security than Rust, because the code is not littered with constructs dealing with memory management.

The only reason to use Rust is if you need the performance. But often, that's only an issue in your "inner loops", so you could write the rest of your code in a more suitable language.

Since in most cases these performance critical parts are only small in terms of lines of code, and hence easily verifiable by hand, you could even write them in C and still not have security issues.

Therefore, I think Rust serves only a very specific need, and isn't nearly as universally "the right tool" as everyone seems to believe.

They do have a nice packaging system, though.

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Re:Gitoxide: Pure Rust Implementation of Git by roca on Thursday August 13, 2020 @06:18AM (#24141751)

For applications like Web browsers the "inner loops" approach to optimization isn't nearly enough. Execution of important benchmarks smears out over huge amounts of code. If executing straight-line code in your favourite language is just a bit slower than C++, or touches more memory than C++, it's a losing proposition.

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Re:Gitoxide: Pure Rust Implementation of Git by amelius on Thursday August 13, 2020 @06:23AM (#24141786)

Yeah, but Web browsers are very much like OSes, and can be considered a special domain where Rust indeed can be useful.

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Re:Gitoxide: Pure Rust Implementation of Git by roca on Friday August 14, 2020 @07:57PM (#24164650)

I think the same would be true of LibreOffice for example.

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