Hacker News Reader

> Is the kind of crazy hack that Rust std uses to prevent TOCTOU attacks with symlinks a language complexity issue or not?

I have no clue what you're talking about and I doubt that it's relevant.

The claim was made that this is "simple". It doesn't feel simple to me. I'm asking about the criteria used and how this fits into that to justify the "simple" claim.

The implementation details of this construct are implementation details of the language.

View on HN

The answer is that the implementation details are abstracted away by the library, the same way that the implementation details of Rust std::file access are abstracted away. That means that while the implementation may not be beautiful, the language doen't need to expand in order to accommodate 20 uses of the feature.

The language could be expanded to support this, but then every user either need to ignore a part of the language, or learn it. Oddball hacks in the internals of a library don't affect users of the library. This article is a deep dive into how the internals of a library happen to work on this iteration of Go.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com