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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

This is a good question to ask, especially about the nightly builds from upstream. There have been NPM exploits targeted at crypto currency developers (e.g. the event-stream breach), so it seems FB would be placing a lot of trust in the Rust developers. This is not to say Rust maintainers are dishonest, but all it takes is one person who's authentication credentials gets comprised.

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Also, it's not just an issue of an intentionally backdoored compiler. The nightly could have some experimental optimization enabled, and if there's a bug in the optimization, it could introduce a vulnerability into the compiled Libra binaries.

Wouldn't the same apply to practically any programming language and development tools? What if they'd chosen Microsoft Visual C++? Would that be less exploitable?

Yes, but who runs against nightly builds of MVC++? The idea is, presumably, that nightly builds have undergone less scrutiny (partly just due to time in existence) and so if there was something it has a higher chance of being caught and reverted before a stable release.

With nightly builds, there’s more of a chance that a piece of malware could sneak in and get used to build a release of Libra. I’m sure the Rust maintainers would find it fairly quickly, but even within a few days there would be tons of Libra users with compromised wallets.

More scrutiny goes into stable release builds than nightly builds, and more mature languages and tools have more experienced maintainers who are often (but of course, not always) better at scrutinizing releases. It’s not that MSVC++ can’t be compromised, but it’s pretty unlikely that it would be.

I don’t think anyone actually runs nightly against what’s on the latest / master. I know at work, we use nightly rust, but we pin to a specific date release, usually when the around latest stable is cut.

The specific point about nightly isn't about Rust per say. It's more about using what is essentially a development version of a compiler, updated nightly. Exploits aren't necessarily even the biggest threat. Nightly could have bugs, and in the context of cryptocurrency, compiler bugs can mean large amounts of lost money.

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