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A comment on Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software. Parent comment

Re:Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software by tialaramex on Saturday September 24, 2022 @04:31PM (#32966307)
Maybe, but the thing about unsafe is, it isn't like fairy dust so sprinkling it on stuff doesn't help. This is a common misconception from people who haven't worked with unsafe (even if they've written some Rust)

ten_things[11] = blah; // is a buffer overflow so it either won't compile or it panics

However

unsafe { ten_things[11] = blah; } // is still a buffer overflow, same effect but also Rust warns that unsafe is useless here and should be removed

Now of course we can write a potential buffer overflow in unsafe Rust, but now we're not just sprinkling unsafe on stuff and hoping, we've got a plan, perhaps a stupid plan but it's a plan so that's an improvement.

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Re:Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software by voorwerpjes on Saturday September 24, 2022 @05:21PM (#32966627)
I agree with you but just for completeness the rust equivalent is unsafe { *ten_things.get_unchecked_mut(11) = blah }

Which goes to show that usually the unsafe methods are more verbose and annoying to deal with. Devs won't reach for them just out of laziness.

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Re:Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software by psychphysic on Saturday September 24, 2022 @05:26PM (#32966663)
I'm sure you're much more knowledgeable than me about Rust at least.

Still based on my experience reading early Redox code it was chock full of unsafe blocks, and I suspect they didn't do that out of malice but to expedite development.

So the risk might still be there.

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Re:Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software by steveklabnik on Saturday September 24, 2022 @05:30PM (#32966686)
Redox: “ A quick grep gives us some stats: the kernel has about 300 invocations of unsafe in about 16,000 lines of code overall.”

https://doc.redox-os.org/book/ch01-07-why-rust.html

This is probably not an up to date number but it gives you some idea of a random snapshot in time at least.

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Re:Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software by psychphysic on Saturday September 24, 2022 @06:19PM (#32967052)
Well if I knew less than the last guy I'm defo beat here :)

Would be interesting to see what those figures were like 5 years ago (i.e. a year or so after its initial release). It seems like the concern here is that embedded Dev for cars isn't getting getting to maturity.

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