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Comment by tredre3 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

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