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Comment by kornish | Hacker News Reader

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kornish

I like the quote from Slide 10:

> Why Rust (for CloudFlare)

> ...

> - Safe (we had a bug once...)

> ...

Funny because according to Algolia, the bug in question is the 7th-most-upvoted HN post of all time, clocking in at about 1k comments.

Great to see Rust gaining industry adoption.

edit: to clarify, I like that Cloudflare can look back at a bug in their C code, chuckle about it, and then start to move on to something safer. This is the bug in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752

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Could you provide a link to it?

I suspect it's this bug: https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-c...

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752

I can't tell if the OP is suggesting the bug they had was due to Rust, or if they adopted Rust for a safe language they once had a bug?

The latter. I think it's a sheepish admission that the bug (caused by unsafe C code) is a reason to prefer Rust's safety, which should help them prevent another one like it.

It is, the person presenting says so in the video.

The cloudflare bug was a memory safety issue in C code, which is basically the whole point of trust

Hah, could you imagine, someone saying they found a bug in a piece of Rust code? I haven't read the HN terms of service, but I'm guessing they you'd get banned pretty quick for something as egregious as that.

The blog post says that this bug is inside code written in C and Ragel (a parser generator), Rust seems not to be involved in this bug

Rust was not the cause of the bug. It was a C bug and was exposed during the process of deleting the code in question (adding the new code to replace it actually exposed the old bug).

It has given us a very keen awareness of just how bad such bugs can be, and hence "we had a bug once" might be considered the soft way of saying "no more effing C". Of course we'll still have C and C++ as we're heavily invested, but if there are safer alternatives that we can use those will definitely be considered first.

What rarely gets discussed in this case was that old, working code was modified in a critical way in order to accommodate new code when that didn't need to be done at all. It was actually a failure in the software development process.

That's the point; Rust operates in the places they needed C before, and C is unsafe.

There is a huge difference between being able to track down unsafe statements and a language where 100% of the source code is unsafe, given the 200+ cases of UB, implicit conversions and lack of data integrity validations.

Sure logic errors can always happen, but moving away from C would already get a portion of memory corruption issues out of the table.

Unless you are asserting that Mesa/Cedar, NEWP, Oberon, Oberon-07, Active Oberon, Modula-2, Modula-2+, Modula-3, Object Pascal, Concurrent Pascal, Component Pascal, Basic, D, Ada, SPARK, Sing#, Midori, BLISS, PL/I, PL/S, PL/8, PL/M, Swift, HPC# are all unsafe as C.

The slide is a bit unclear, the whole deck is terse and clearly not intended to be consumed independently from the presentation, so "Safe (we had a bug once…)" should be interpreted as "safe (we kind-of had a not-very-small bug in our C code once)" not "Safe (we've only had one Rust bug)"

Indeed. It was very much just prepared as some talking points for the folks in the room. Makes more sense with the video. Note to self: Stuff about Rust always makes it to HN. :)

I think this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752

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