Comment by ianm218 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianm218 | Hacker News Reader

I have been working on the same problem in other areas. My ultimate goal is to rewrite nginx in Rust passing as much as the upstream tests as possible while leveraging the strongest aspects of Ruts ecosystem - i.e. rustls (modern memory safe OpenSSL), Tokio (async runtime), h2 (http 2 impl) rather than implementing from scratch like the upstream. I started with Lua, then porting over Valkey, and now working on nginx. The reason was because I wanted to learn the ins and outs before taking on the most complex portion.

[1]. https://github.com/ianm199/lua-rs/tree/main Lua

[2]. https://github.com/ianm199/valdr Valkey/ Redis

[3]. https://github.com/ianm199/nginx-rs-port nginx

Happy to answer any questions on the approach! When I started a few weeks ago the harnesses on their own were not good enough to get very far without a "meta harness" of sorts but that is changing largely with Claude Workloads and Mythos. A lot of the work is developing some custom tooling to move these along faster.

Yeah I got one, why? You aren't learning anything, you are just copying code from other codebases and smashing it together to make some nginx-rust thingie... for what actual goal?

Well the biggest goal was to be useful. Nginx serves ~20% of the web, memory unsafe languages might just become untractable for critical exposed to the web infra if the rate of critical CVE's on these rises faster than they can be patched, so a drop in replacement would be a big deal in that world.

But in terms of learning I'm learning relatively little about how to type Rust into an editor but a lot about how to set up agentic loops that can autonomously get tests to pass and improve performance.

For example if you just tell a frontier model (gpt5.5 or Claude Code 4.8) to make some portion of the tests pass they will take forever and just bang their heads against it. I developed a framework to mimic a lot of these tests in nginx... but in minimum non blocking ways so you can run many in parallel with short feedback loops.

Similar for performance - how to make tons of performance benchmark and expose maximum telemetry for agents to go and analyze the hotpaths etc.

Buddy, I think it is time to not engage with these models for a bit, you seem to have lost your mind.

We're literally in a thread on converting legacy C projects to idiomatic Rust? It seems many people are working on this same problem.

There are plenty of Rust based reverse proxies out there, why do you need to specifically rewrite nginx? You could also write a config adapter to Caddy, there are a billion options, but this is a wasted effort. The people who want to stick to their nginx configs won't use your project ever, and the people who actually care about security aren't going to use a vibe coded project.

I have no idea why you are making me spell this out, I thought it was pretty obvious.

nit: well-written C projects to legacy Rust

You mean you rewrote the nginx test suite with smaller leaner tests ? How did you bootstrap that ? How do you know the leaner tests are equivalent to the real ones ?

Here is an example https://github.com/ianm199/nginx-rs-port/blob/main/crates/ng...

Basically I use these "kits" to prove that the behavior is working as expected with mocked data/ interfaces and then only after these kits pass I'll run the real test suite files as confirmation. So these let you iterate a lot faster than the official test suite because it is very slow.

These are bootstrapped from the real tests.

The other commenter was being a bit dismissive but this is the kind of thing I'm taking away as a real useful pattern to do verification of behavior at scale.

> Nginx serves ~20% of the web, memory unsafe languages might just become untractable for critical exposed to the web infra if the rate of critical CVE's on these rises faster than they can be patched

That is true, however did you actually do any research into nginx? Is it particularly prone to memory bugs?

I honestly don't know the answer but you seem to be coming from a place of C bad, therefore nginx super vulnerable?

In my experience with other web servers the vast majority of security bugs are string handling related (path/header injection), which your rewrite will not protect you from.

https://securityaffairs.com/192132/hacking/nginx-rift-an-18-...

The project was inspired by that. Also unlike most other projects, nginx is directly exposed to the internet often times which makes it more vulnerable than i.e. Redis/ Valkey or something that would be running within a companies network generally.

"C Bad" is a bit reductionist... but I think there is some truth to the take " Until you have the evidence, don’t bother with hypothetical notions that someone can write 10 million lines of C without ubiquitious memory-unsafety vulnerabilities – it’s just Flat Earth Theory for software engineers" [1]

NSA and other government orgs are also pushing people to stop using C [2] for important software.

[1]. https://alexgaynor.net/2020/may/27/science-on-memory-unsafet... [2]. https://linuxsecurity.com/news/government/nsa-s-plea-stop-us...

I think the risks of a rewrite - especially when using AI - are far more problematic than memory safety. In the long run those C projects will be memory safe in the next five years using memory safe C implementations.

My perspective is that it is good to have a beta in a lot of directions.

No one really knows what the endgame of software security looks like.

So some people should try the port to rust angle, some should focus on hardening the C, some should explore more exotic options like formally provable languages etc

There is nothing wrong with trying different things. But the fundamental problem here is that projects and their communities are social projects and need to be to fulfill their purposes and to ensure long term maintenance. In a free software context, rewrites just like forks (1) are fundamentally an asocial (2) activity because they fragment the community (if successful) and then increase overall maintenance burden if not able to replace the original project completely (rarely the case). Disrespect the license choice of the original authors makes this worse.

1) There may be situation were are fork makes sense (e.g. because one project can not serve different use cases well): 2) Which is why usually a "higher goal" is used to justify this, e.g. authors pretend (or lie to themselves, or may be be stupid enough to actually believe this) that some improvement in memory safety is really that important.

You won't get anywhere pressing your case here. This group has already found you guilty, and no argument will change their minds.

You've been caricatured into a blind AI-follower rust-rewriter-just-because type, and that's the surface they'll continually attack (you're wasting time, hurting the community, v2-itis, bikeshedding, premature optimization, copyright violation, moustache-twirling-evil-intent-rug-pull-later, etc etc etc).

Just continue in your work. It's good, and we need people like you.

There was no caricature as a "AI follower" etc. I gave my arguments you didn't.

> the biggest goal was to be useful

Please excuse me for being unnecessarily harsh for a moment, but web servers are a dime a dozen. Quite literally. The reason nginx is successful is because it is maintained. Unless you plan on maintaining your nginx-clone as well as nginx itself, it will not be useful.

Perhaps you do, in which case I am more than happy to be wrong, but sometimes people think the act of writing software itself is useful and that other people will happily swarm over it and maintain it in their absence, but that is usually not the case.

The world has tens of thousands of http daemons, increasing that number by one is not useful in itself. The act of maintaining software over time and keeping it useful for many people however, absolutely can be.

One very strong draw I feel, that's mentioned in this article: Rust's portability, it's ability to be compiled to wasm & run very well anywhere.

Because C code in production is a ticking time bomb.

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