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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't understand this. If Google or Apple wanted it to happen, they could force those developers to learn Rust. Are you saying the people that wrote the products in question can't learn Rust well enough to achieve the goal?

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Forcing their employees to learn rust doesn't mean Google has the capacity to rewrite all their software in rust. They have tons and tons of code which would need to be rewritten from scratch.

Of course if they dropped all other development and told their employees to rewrite to rust, they may end up with a piece of software written in rust but no customers.

I agree, but there's so many people at Google (132,000 if you can believe the search results), it's hard for me to believe they couldn't devote a small percentage of them to moving to a secure stack.

"Moving to a new stack" implies rewriting much of the code (and: a surprising amount of the code) built on the existing stack.

And you don't realize their codebase must also be really large like their number of employees. They must have a lot of code per employee.

Let's say 50 000 write code and a small percentage is 10%. So then your idea is that 45 000 would continue to write code in the unsafe languages and 5 000 would rewrite old and newly written code in rust? How many years do you think it would take for the 10% of developers to write all the old code and all the newly written by the 90%?

Start with the fact that practically all software development at Apple and Google would cease for multiple months while people dealt with the Rust learning curve, which is not gentle, and proceed from there to the fact that Rust demands (or, at least, urgently requests) architectural changes from typical programs designed in other languages.

Now: rewrite 20 years worth of code.

Let's make sure we're clear: I agree --- and, further, assert that every other serious person agrees --- that memory safety is where the industry needs to go, urgently.

When you say architectural changes how do you mean? Most of the memory stuff isn't particularly exotic there's a lot of different syntax/Functional programming influences but I'm curious why it would be wildly exotic compared to most C++ code or have I misunderstood?

It doesn't matter how exotic something is when you're taking about rewriting an entire platform - the sheer amount of man hours required to reimplement something for an advantage the vast majority of customers simply don't value enough is the limiting factor.

In that context, even a small architectural difference can be seen as a high barrier.

It'd still be like replacing the engines of an aeroplane mid-flight surely? I know Rust can do C interop and it'd probably be done piecemeal but it'd still be an absolutely gargantuan task. I'd say there's a fair chance the sheer time and effort such an undertaking would involve would cost more than the memory safety bugs using C or C++ introduces.

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