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Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2048

This really lacks the concise magic of the C obfuscated/underhanded contests, its a lot easier to hide crazy behaviour amongst one of dozens of files and library imports...

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+1. The reason only 4 people submitted is that the challenge seems so, well, intimidating. Not hard intimidating, but "I wouldn't be able to think up & code a decent entry in a few minutes" intimidating. Nobody really wants to make a whole toy payment processing system like this, just to come up with one underhanded bug. It also comes with a lot of tooling: with underhanded rust, it is very clear that this is a project, with multiple files, cargo, dependencies, etc. All of the underhanded C contests are single-file, often single- or two-function solutions.

I think that's a huge jump to a conclusion.

Far more likely is that Rust is niche, and fluency sufficient to produce something underhanded is exceedingly rare for that same reason.

C, on the other hand, has been around for decades and is used by an order of magnitude (or two) more developers.

It's simply not a fair comparison, and it's decidedly fanboyish to conclude otherwise.

Be careful not to jump to conclusions as well. :) Even given that Rust is newer (as well as hopefully harder to exploit!) it's entirely fair to criticize the contest rules for being a bit intimidating, and doesn't imply fanboyishness or anti-Rust sentiment. I think it was an interesting experiment to try crafting a more "real-world" underhanded challenge in contrast to the highly artificial underhanded C contest, especially since this is the first such contest and the organizers weren't sure if they were going to get a flood of responses or a trickle. But personally, for future iterations of this contest I'd suggest something more freeform to encourage more submissions (which is ultimately better for the security of the language, after all!).

Haha, in that respect, it's a terrific argument for the language, I suppose.

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