Rust is a hard way to make a web API

Re:Rust is a hard way to make a web API by Arnavion on Saturday January 16, 2021 @06:32AM (#25801613)

Filesystems, networking, ... Basically anything a program needs to interact with things outside its address space requires C interop and thus unsafe code. I sure hope your web server is listening on a socket because it's not going to be much of a web server otherwise.

Then there's crypto, for which the corelib defers to the OS (CNG / openssl) because doing crypto in managed code is hard.

But forget all that; even pure C# code isn't safe because it occasionally needs to hook into the CLR for unsafe things. Eg https://source.dot.net/#System.Private.CoreLib/Dictionary.cs... - unsafe code called from Dictionary.Remove

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Re:Rust is a hard way to make a web API by Const-me on Saturday January 16, 2021 @08:45AM (#25802119)

All modern OSes are written in C and/or C++, unsafe code is inevitable there. Some people tried to fix that a few times (hardware java machines, singularity/midori, etc.), wasn't good enough.

> unsafe code called from Dictionary.Remove

For creating, and checking for, empty reference.

Rust standard library uses unsafe way more. That design has consequences, e.g. check this https://medium.com/@shnatsel/how-rusts-standard-library-was-...

It's somewhat harder to screw up when you can rely on VM guarantees, and don't need that level of trust in the libraries you consume.

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Re:Rust is a hard way to make a web API by Arnavion on Saturday January 16, 2021 @04:13PM (#25805558)

You misunderstand. I have nothing against the standard libraries of a language using unsafe code. However you are the one that said:

>but for general-purpose stuff like the web you never need anything unsafe.

... and:

>> it's pretty common in both of these languages for there to be C libraries involved somewhere in the stack.

>Negative. [...] All their core components are 100% managed code.

... so I posted a correction.

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