Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by southerntofu on Friday January 14, 2022 @08:27AM (#29934168)

Yes, pretty much like that. The author put "unsafe" blocks everywhere and the rest is history. Unsafe as a keyword is a kind of pledge: as a dev, you swear to the compiler that you've checked this part for correctness/safety. If you don't, you may get bitten, but the simple fact that "grep -R unsafe" will yield most (if not all) instances of potential memory fuckups is a huge win for auditability.

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by pjmlp on Friday January 14, 2022 @08:34AM (#29934247)

Rust's unsafe wouldn't have done anything to protect against an hypotetical log4r.

As for the memory fuckups you are right, pity that they are using a C GUI library.

Even if the binding has been deemed safe upon validation, if only remains a valid certification until the next Gtk version update, even minor ones might break the assumptions validated on the unsafe code block.

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by southerntofu on Friday January 14, 2022 @08:55AM (#29934421)

> Rust's unsafe wouldn't have done anything to protect against an hypotetical log4r.

You are correct. No programming language will protect you from writing flawed application logic.

> pity that they are using a C GUI library. (...) Gtk version update, even minor ones might break the assumptions

I don't know about that. GTK is more "battletested" than most frameworks, and has a lot of contributors to fix bugs. Also, and that's a very important point, GTK cares for accessibility! Using any other framework would have meant excluding a lot of people from the GUI.

As for assumptions, i certainly hope GTK devs don't push breaking changes to the ABI on minor updates. But i guess that's yet another assumption that can be broken.

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