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Comment by mrits | Hacker News Reader

Would you prefer it written in Rust with everything wrapped in unsafe block?

That is an obviously false dichotomy. The author of the comment never mentioned Rust, and wasn’t asking about Rust. Such a false dichotomy feels like flamebait, which is against HN guidelines.

Your false dichotomy also implies that “unsafe” blocks are as unsafe as C++, which is not true. “Unsafe” in Rust turns off very few checks[0], most of them are still active. No one would write a serious Rust program entirely in unsafe anyways.

Regardless, asking about security considerations is a valid thing to do, even if it were written in Rust. Security is not just about memory safety.

[0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/keyword.unsafe.html#unsafe-abi...

Furthermore, choice of language can have an effect as to the actual security of the networking layer.

Having parsers (and serializers) proved absent of runtime errors (e.g. with something like SPARK) is a form of guarantee I wish I'd see as the default in any 'serious' network-facing library or component. It's not even that hard to achieve, compared to the learning curve of the borrow checker.

Once rust gets plugged into Why3 and gets some industrial-grade proof capacity, the question of 'is it written in rust?' will be automatic (as in 'why would you do it any other way?').

You probably want to spend a bit of time in the Rust community before your speak on it.

Rust's guarantees are all about what's happening inside your own process with memory ownership. "Security" in the context of a middleware like this is almost certainly more about external validation/auth— what prevents some random node from injecting messages into the queue, or adding itself as a subscriber to the output?

Also, it's a super bad-faith argument to talk about an entire program being in an unsafe block. Rust's unsafe is about specifically and intentionally opting out of certain guardrails in a limited scope of code where it should be fairly easy for a human reviewer to understand and validate the more complex invariants that aren't enforceable by the compiler itself.

This is absolutely not what Rust unsafe block is about. It is about getting around the limitations of the compiler to gain efficiency. And it happens a lot.

> Unsafe Rust exists because, by nature, static analysis is conservative. When the compiler tries to determine whether or not code upholds the guarantees, it’s better for it to reject some valid programs than to accept some invalid programs. Although the code might be okay, if the Rust compiler doesn’t have enough information to be confident, it will reject the code. In these cases, you can use unsafe code to tell the compiler, “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html

You might want to read the page you linked

"you can give up guaranteed safety in exchange for greater performance "

I care more about methodology than specific methods. I would like applications that handle I/O, especially network I/O, to be designed and built with security in mind. I asked my question because that doesn't appear to be the case here, and I think that is dissapointing and concerning from a security perspective.

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