They’re simply right about one core thing and they’re loud about it when it comes up. Until something proves them wrong and steals their thunder… I don’t know what to tell you.
Not sure what to do about that really, but I think it caused many C++ programmers to hate the language before they even tried it.
Experience shows that memory safety issues are the most common cause of security issues.
Microsoft:
>As we’ve seen, roughly 70% of the security issues that the [Microsoft Security Response Center] assigns a CVE to are memory safety issues. This means that if that software had been written in Rust, 70% of these security issues would most likely have been eliminated.
https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe...
Google:
>Roughly 70% of all serious security bugs in the Chrome codebase are memory management and safety bugs, Google engineers said this week.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/chrome-70-of-all-security-bugs...
Microsoft:
>we’ll peek at why we think that Rust represents the best alternative to C and C++ currently available.
First, there are plenty of fantastic memory safe languages already available and widely used inside and outside of Microsoft, including .NET languages like C# or F# and other languages like Swift, Go, and Python. We encourage anyone who is currently using C or C++ to consider whether one of these languages would be appropriate to use instead.
We, however, are talking about the need for a safe systems programming language (i.e., a language that can build systems other software runs on, like OS kernels). Such workloads need the speed and predictable performance that C, C++, and Rust provide.
When thinking about why Rust is a good alternative, it’s good to think about what we can’t afford to give up by switching from C or C++ — namely performance and control. Rust, just like C and C++ has a minimal and optional “runtime”. Rust’s standard library depends on libc for platforms that support it just like C and C++, but the standard library is also optional so running on platforms without an operating system is also possible.
Rust, just like C and C++, also gives the programmer fine-grained control on when and how much memory is allocated allowing the programmer to have a very good idea of exactly how the program will perform every time it is run. What this means for performance in terms of raw speed, control, and predictability, is that Rust, C, and C++ can be thought of in similar terms.
https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe...
Sure thing but can Rust live up to its memory-safety promise? Or even data-race freedom promise?
I must say that, coming from systems programming background, I was always skeptical about those promises because IMO these problems fundamentally cannot be solved in bare-metal programming language. They're implied by the complexity of HW not loop-holes in programming languages.
That said I see nothing wrong with Rust but I think that people are vastly overselling its core features while at the same time a quick glance over https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=rust will give you exactly a list of bugs which Rust seems to promise not to run into.
Another very recent example, and a very good blog post about memory corruption taking place in Rust: https://www.graplsecurity.com/post/attacking-firecracker
That’s the biggest one, anyway. I picked up Rust for the first time 8 years ago. I liked it: it felt comfortable in my “worn” C++ hands. But the community outside of a very few core individuals who care deeply about the language’s success can be quite toxic and dismissive of anyone who suggests Rust isn’t basically perfect. And it was a bit of a turn off for me, personally.