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Comment by imranhou | Hacker News Reader

Windows does not support drivers based on rust language, so perhaps may be another 5 years

You can write drivers in Rust - it's just quite hard at the moment. Microsoft published metadata packages for WDK APIs and started creating samples: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-rust-driver-samples

Good. Microsoft doing something sensible.

How can that be possible? Are drivers not binary files?

Rust can't compile DLLs? AFAIK it can?

Look at Linux. Getting Rust to work with the kernel is a long story of defining APIs, cleaning up the C-side API to make it tenable, coding test filesystems and whatnot to make sure it all works, and getting buy-in and maintenance for all of the above.

Doing the same with zero control over the non-Rust side of the kernel seems completely untenable.

I am not saying there are no challenges. I am saying that CrowdStrike does not seem to have even tried to have a better process. Rust would be only a small part of the picture; just one more layer in the security posture (a small one at that, admittedly).

Exactly. It's like the brown M&Ms in the Van Halen rider; it's not that the M&M's were the problem, but that it was a test of diligence. People who don't care about detail are likely to screw up the big things just as badly as they screw up the little things.

Being a multi-million dollar company and using unsafe languages today is not a good look. But everyone gets away with it because everyone else is doing it.

This is a kernel driver. Runs in kernel space. Intercepts syscalls. You'd definitely be fighting uphill to write it in Rust. And your code would be riddled with `unsafe` by necessity anyways.

Fair enough, still Rust's unsafe is not dropping all of its guarantees. Quite a lot of them remain in place.

Not saying you can't write bugs in Rust, of course -- that would be crazily delusional. I am saying they needed a better process. And I am saying that a stricter language could have improved the process a bit as well.

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