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Comment by sohkamyung | Hacker News Reader

Here's what Daniel Stenberg had to say about the move [1]

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/10/09/rust-in-curl-with-hyp...

I guess we'll change the URL to that from https://www.abetterinternet.org/post/memory-safe-curl/, since the blog post has at least some technical detail. Thanks!

This quote is interesting: “ I’m a bit vague on the details here because it’s not my expertise, but Rust itself can’t even properly clean up its memory and just returns error when it hits such a condition. Clearly something to fix before a libcurl with hyper could claim identical behavior and never to leak memory”.

So Rust aborts on invalid memory accesses, unwrap on None, etc. It does not abort on memory leaks. I don’t see Rust aborting in that context as much different from a segfault, and it guards against more situations than a segfault is able to do. Additionally, when stack unwinding is enabled (default) aborts can be caught during runtime and handled specially, if that’s necessary.

Edit: I said “aborts” above, I should have said “panics”. The option in Rust is to disable unwinding and instead abort immediately: https://doc.rust-lang.org/edition-guide/rust-2018/error-hand...

That can’t be caught at runtime, to be clear.

More details here: https://github.com/hyperium/hyper/issues/2265#issuecomment-6...

> So Rust aborts on invalid memory accesses, unwrap on None, etc.

Rust will panic on these things, and panics can abort, or unwind. Unwind is the default.

That's not what's being talked about here, I don't think. This is about alloc::alloc::handle_alloc_error, which was not allowed to unwind at the time the linked comment was made. But in the last few hours, https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/76448 was linked to, which shows how that has since changed.

This is an interesting case for error-handling, because a) it can happen virtually anywhere, so handling it with Result would add huge API overhead in terms of ergonomics (given that most code never really has to think about it), yet b) it's very important that it is able to be handled in certain kinds of system contexts, which panics are not designed to facilitate. Most error cases seem to fall neatly into one camp or the other (something you always want to explicitly handle, or something where you just want to abort), but this one doesn't.

handle_alloc_error seems to do well enough as a workaround, but (from my superficial reading of the GitHub thread) it feels like just a very specific "poor-man's try/catch" for this one particular case. It feels like a workaround.

In general I'm a big fan of Result/panic in place of traditional exceptions, but this usecase makes it really quite unideal

> This is an interesting case for error-handling, because

I think this is a very good articulation of this space, thank you.

> It feels like a workaround.

I agree, but the needed work to improve this has taken a very, very, very long time, and so I think workarounds are ultimately helpful. We'll get there...

I think it can honestly be traced down to just how wide a stretch of usecases Rust itself has managed to span. For systems, this arguably is "something you always want to explicitly handle", whereas for applications it's almost always "something where you just want to abort". The level of abstraction is very different, but a single language is spanning both. Or, more precisely, a single standard library.

Just spitballing: maybe one solution could be an alternate set of standard primitives, specifically for low-level work, that do return a Result for everything that might trigger OOM? Maybe those could be abstracted out of the current standard library, and the existing ("application-level") APIs could wrap them with a panic?

This is AFAICT essentially what wg-allocators is working on where you can directly specify an allocator in collections (and alloc() returns a Result): https://github.com/TimDiekmann/alloc-wg

From the readme it sounds like this has actually started to be upstreamed now?

> This is an interesting case for error-handling, [...]

Part of the problem is that it's actually two different error cases: A, the data we're operating on is too large, versus B: the system as a whole doesn't have enough memory. Case A is obviously[0] a explicitly-handle error (just like "the data we're operating on is malformed"), whereas case B is obviously a just-give-up error (like "the system doesn't have a floating-point unit"). But there doesn't seem to be any practical way to reliably distinguish the two cases, and it's not clear they can be rigorously separated even in principle.

0: we might decide to 'handle' it by aborting, but that's not special to allocation

I'm still annoyed that the Rust people screwed up error handling so badly. The designers should have gone with classical exceptions like other languages, but instead went for a fashionable-at-the-time combination of error codes and added exceptions (spelled "panics"), cribbed for some reason from Go. And on top of that, the Rust designers copied one of the most annoying parts of the C++ ecosystem: a compiler switch for changing exception behavior.

The overall result is that everyone pays the cognitive cost of exception (spelled "unwind" in Rust) safety, pays the syntactic and runtime costs of error code checking, pays the runtime cost of unwind tables, and still can't actually rely on unwinding to actually work, because anyone can just turn panics into aborts.

I hope for a language with Rust's focus on memory safety but without Rust's weird fashionable-in-the-2010s language design warts.

> The overall result is that everyone pays the cognitive cost of exception (spelled "unwind" in Rust) safety

Very, very few people have to think about unwind safety, because it really only comes into play when you're writing unsafe code, and relying on the ability for panics to be caught. Many folks aren't writing any unsafe, and many who are are doing it explicitly in a panic=abort environment. And most don't rely on panics being able to be caught in the first place.

So, some subset of library authors have to pay attention to unwind safety in some cases. This is hardly "everyone."

> pays the syntactic

It's one character.

> and runtime costs of error code checking,

Exceptions also have runtime costs. I'm not aware of anything demonstrating that there is a really major difference between the two in real systems. I would be interested in reading more about this! Most of the discussion I've seen focuses on microbenchmarks, which can be very different than real code.

> pays the runtime cost of unwind tables,

Only if you want them, as you yourself mention, you can turn this off. And many do.

Okay so, technically in theory you can introduce logic bugs, but not memory safety bugs, if you don't consider unwind safety in safe code. Logic bugs can happen in any code, of course.

The practical, day-to-day implications of this still round to zero, though.

> The practical, day-to-day implications of this still round to zero, though.

Vendors have been using similar language to downplay potential bugs for decades, usually to disastrous results. At one point, even memory safety wasn't a big deal. I'm just waiting for a software package to have a security vulnerability when an attacker is able to trigger an untested Rust unwind path and put some Rust daemon into a state it didn't expect.

There are many good parts of Rust, but I don't think I'm ever going to convinced that the error handling wasn't a huge and unfixable mistake. It's because error handling is such a big mistake that Rust has grown layers of syntactic sugar --- try!, !, etc. --- to paper over the ugly spot in the language.

Again, I am only speaking of logic bugs here. You cannot introduce memory safety bugs without unsafe code.

> I don't think I'm ever going to convinced that the error handling wasn't a huge and unfixable mistake.

That's fine. No language can satisfy everyone.

Logic bugs can be just as disastrous as memory safety bugs. From an attacker's point of view, they're ultimately about making a program do something not intended. Downplaying logic bugs (where Rust is weak) and emphasizing memory safety (where Rust is strong) might make Rust look better, but it's not doing any favors for computing.

I agree that they can be. There are a few differences:

1. It is not clear that we will ever be free of logic bugs to the same degree that we can minimize memory safety bugs.

2. We're in a specific context in this sub-thread, and that's that you claimed that this is a pervasive issue that everyone must consider all the time. These logic bugs can only be introduced in a context that is very unusual, and so my claim is not that logic bugs in general are irrelevant, but that the context that this kind of bug can appear is smaller than you say it is.

> logic bugs (where Rust is weak)

Rust gives you way more tools than C to reduce logic bugs as well.

The whole point of secure programming is caring about those "unusual" contexts. And the comparison to C isn't really fair: C is dangerous for everything. Yes, Rust is better than C, and even better in some ways than C++, but my point is that there's another Rust out there, a Rust^, that's even better than Rust, and Rust^ uses exceptions for error handling throughout.

> It's one character.

No it isn't. With exceptions:

  fn foo() -> i32 {
    let x = bar();
    x + 1
  }

  fn foo() -> Result<i32, SomeErrorType> {
    let x = bar()?;
    Ok(x + 1)
  }

This is fair, thank you for the correction.

I do think it's not quite what you're saying though, due to Rust's design, we would have checked exceptions, and so the Result part would be there with exceptions, it's the Ok() part that would change.

In theory you could make a language without checked exceptions that would make it be like your example.

Most applications are not supposed to survive a panic!(), to the point where I personally tend to use "panic = 'abort'" for any code where performance matters. As such it's not really a mental overhead, and definitely not the Rust way of doing error handling (in the same way than using "assert" and a signal handler is not the way you're supposed to do error handling in C++).

The Rust way of dealing with errors is to return a Result<> and in my experience it's the best system I've used. It doesn't have the code flow breaking aspect of exceptions while being a lot nicer and less error-prone than C or Go style error handling.

How does Rust handle errors coming out of library operations? Is the main application able to override the panic handling behavior of a library?

Libraries can declare "I require semantic x or semantic y." Applications can as well. If an application says it needs semantic x, and a library says it requires semantic y, you get a compile error.

Most libraries do not depend on a particular semantic, in my experience.

I assume library authors can specialize code to either semantic as well, and carefully target both in a single library? E.g. with cfg attributes/macros.

I actually don't think so, but I'm also not sure what use case would require you to do this. Generally, you're agnostic, and only in very specific circumstances would you require unwind. I'm not sure when a library would require abort.

I can't come up with a case for requiring abort, but perhaps there are some performance optimizations possible when not unwinding? I assume the compiler does plenty already, but e.g. there would be no need to hang on to any data for making better error messages from a panic, since you can't capture it.

Yes, the binary crate determines the behaviour of panics. Libraries do typically not use panics for errors.

If Rust had gone with exceptions, we'd have lost the entire embedded community. You have to realize that -C panic=abort was added in no small part because of a hostile fork of the language that removed the unwinding mechanism.

I happen to like exceptions in principle, but for a lot of low-level embedded code they're a deal breaker.

Interesting to contrast with curl is C: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2017/03/27/curl-is-c

Looks like they've figured out a good way to allow bringing in safety while avoiding the risks any change will bring

basically there are already a lot of interchangeable backends, they are going to introduce a new one written in rust, which should increase memory security, but rust itself does not cleanup itself when it panics

I suppose he's really keen on a Fish in a Barrel bounty...

https://github.com/fishinabarrel/bounty

I think it's fair to say that this work is quite likely to qualify :-)

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