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Comment by erk__ | Hacker News Reader

A quick unscientific count on cve.org counts ~86 race condition CVEs in the Linux kernel last year, so you might be overstating how well bug antennas work.

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If the kernel was completely written in Rust, we could have a lot of unsafe places, and many Rust CVEs. It is hard to tell, and the comparison in theory should be made after the kernel is developed only by people lacking the C experience that made the current developers so able to reason about race conditions (also when they write Rust).

That's quite the double standard. You extrapolate from one single Rust bug, but insist that "it's hard to tell" and you need completely unrealistic levels of empirical evidence to draw conclusions from the reported C bugs...

Reminds me of this classic: "Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...)

86 race conditions compared to what baseline? This is a bit meaningless without benchmarking against other kernels

It's 1 compared to 86, 86 is the baseline.

But you need to control for lines of code at the very least — otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges

Then it would not be unscientific.

Yeah I mean I could also say "there are no CVEs written in PERL in the kernel ergo PERL is safer to write than Rust". Given there's close to zero .pl files in the kernel, I think we can all agree my assertion holds

That claim relies on an absurd "in the kernel" qualifier, making it difficult to agree with. Furthermore, your hypothesis is that "we all" agree with claims that rely on absurd conditions as a matter of course.

I'm perfectly happy to say that it's not a very good way to make a comparison.

That is no base line. That is a comparison with no statistical value.

Tbh I thought that was clear when I used the phrase "unscientific".

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