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Comment by alfiedotwtf | Hacker News Reader

I would have to disagree.

If you think it's just hype, try and calculate the enormous waste of both time and money from memory leaks caused by code written in C and C++. Rust solves this, and it's only going to get better once we're on the other side of Rust 1.0, and the library ecosystem grows.

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I think by hype he meant enthusiasm : it doesn't mean Rust or Go is useless but that enthusiasm for this languages is far more present on HN than anywhere else.

> Try and calculate the enormous waste of both time and money from memory leaks caused by code written in C and C++. Rust solves this...

This seems like an unusual language feature to highlight --- don't most modern programming languages solve this problem with various implementations of GC or memory management? N.B. I am not at all familiar with Rust and so maybe I'm missing some important context...

Yes, but all managed languages will necessarily be less performant and less efficient than C/C++/D/Rust (barring a hypothetical future interpreted language with an amazing JIT and GC; LuaJIT has the JIT part down but definitely not the GC). Rust is specifically for systems programming. If you don't need to do systems programming, then sure, use C# or Scala or whatever you like.

Not just memory leaks... all the recent hacks/exploits are showing us that even the best people in our field can't write secure code in C/C++. You can reduce your attack surface substantially by using a language like Rust.

Imho, it's a scalability issue.

Was OpenSSL secure when it was originally written in X lines of code? Very likely.

Is it feasible to expect it to be secure now that it's X^Y lines of code, when a large class of bugs can exist in any line of code? No.

That's what 15 years of an evolving codebase has taught us. Which is reasonable, given that a lot of open source projects came into existence in the mid-90s. Inculcate lesson, design language for next 15 years. Not that radical.

Does it really matter whether it's a scalability issue though? The bottom line is that the code has bugs, whether it's due to the fact that the codebase is large is somewhat irrelevant.

By scalability, I meant more along the lines of, "Is it possible/efficient/reasonable to write large, secure codebases in language X using process Y?"

Answer A is "Yes, bugs come from bad development practices or unskilled programmers."

Answer B is "No, there are fundamental issues with the language that make it unreasonable to expect a secure product."

In other words, are the primary sources of bugs programmers or the ways the language forces them to interface with it?

The more I've been hearing about Rust, the more I'd like to try it. What's the equivalent of "_why the Lucky Stiff's Poignant Guide to Ruby" for Rust?

The official guide[0] is worked on by Steve Klabnik and serves as a good introduction to the programming language. Where you go from there is the hard part a lot of people interested in Rust struggle with. I recommend building a clone of some command line tool you like or if you're a Ruby/Python/JavaScript programmer try and build an extension for those languages but written in Rust instead of C. Good luck!

0 - http://doc.rust-lang.org/0.12.0/guide.html

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