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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

> Anybody who thought the simple action of rewriting things in Rust would eliminate all bugs was hopelessly naive

All bugs is typically a strawman typically only used by detractors. The correct claim is: safe Rust eliminates certain classes of bugs. I'd wager the design of std eliminates more (e.g. the different string types), but that doesn't really apply to the kernel.

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> All bugs is typically a strawman typically only used by detractors. The correct claim is: safe Rust eliminates certain classes of bugs. I'd wager the design of std eliminates more (e.g. the different string types), but that doesn't really apply to the kernel.

Which is either 1) not true as evidenced by this bug or 2) a tautology whereby Rust eliminates all bugs that it eliminates.

>> safe Rust

> 1) not true as evidenced by this bug

Code used unsafe, putting us out of "safe" rust.

I think the answer is #2, the tautology. But just because it’s a tautology doesn’t mean it’s a worthless thing to say. I think it’s also true, for instance (a corollary), that Rust eliminates more types of bugs than C does. And that may be valuable even if it does not mean that Rust eliminates all bugs.

> All bugs is typically a strawman typically only used by detractors.

That's obviously not true; we've had years and years of "if it compiles it works" derailing C and C++ forums all over the internet.

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