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Comment by huimang | Hacker News Reader

Because the bugs were caused by programmer error, not anything inherent to rust. It was more notable due to cloudflare being a critical dependency for half the internet, but that particular issue could've happened in any language.

This kind of melodramatic reaction to rust code is fatiguing, honestly. Rust does not bill itself as some programming panacea or as a bug free language, and neither do any of the people I know using it. That's a strawman that just won't go away.

Rust applies constraints regarding memory use and that nearly eliminates a class of bugs, provided safe usage. And that's compelling to enough people that it warrants migration from other languages that don't focus on memory safety. Bugs introduced during a rewrite aren't notable. It happens, they get fixed, life moves on.

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> caused by programmer error, not anything inherent to Rust

Your argument does not work as a praise for Rust because the bugs in any program are caused by programmer errors, except the very rare cases when there are bugs in the compiler tool chain, which are caused by errors of other programmers.

The bugs in a C or C++ program are also caused by programmer errors, they are not inherent to C/C++. It is rather trivial to write C/C++ carefully, in order to make impossible any access outside bounds, numeric overflow, use-after-free, etc.

The problem is that many programmers are careless, especially when they might be pressed by tight time schedules, so they make some of these mistakes. For the mass production of software, it is good to use more strict programming languages, including Rust, where the compiler catches as many errors as possible, instead of relying on better programmers.

I'm neither praising or admonishing rust. Did you read the parent comment or its parents' comment I was responding to at all?

(grandparent comment): "Cloudflare crashed a chunk of the internet with a rust app a month or so ago"

The actual bug had nothing to do with rust, yet rust is specifically brought up here.

(grandparent comment): "Rust isn’t a panacea, it’s a programming language. It’s ok that it’s flawed, all languages are."

No Rust programmer thinks it's a panacea! Rust has never advertised itself this way.

The cloudflare bug was the equivalent of an uncaught exception caused by a malformed config file. There's no recovery from a malformed config file - the software couldn't possibly have done its job. What's salient is that they were using an alternative to exceptions, because people were told exceptions were error-prone, and using this thing instead would make it easier to write bug-free code. But don't do the equivalent of not catching them!

And then, it turned out to not really be any better than exceptions.

Most Rust evangelism is like this. "In Rust you do X and this makes your code have fewer bugs!" Well no it doesn't. Manually propagating exceptions still makes the program crash and requires more typing, and doesn't emit a stack trace.

That was why I brought it up. I wasn't trying to be snarky or haughty. Thank you for filling in the gaps, I should have done that instead of the 1-liner.

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