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Comment by bobdole1971 | Hacker News Reader

bobdole1971·

Speaking of that, I wonder why uTox & Tox weren't made in memory safe languages in the first place. There could be many possible reasons, so I won't bother speculating.

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Developer malpractice. Nothing security critical should be written in non-memory safe languages, unless you have no other option (like some embedded systems code).

I'm not saying this to be mean. I've written lots of bad bugs myself. Humans are fallible-- that's why we have guards on saws, count pills twice in the pharmacy, and use modern languages when we're not in a sandbox.

Just build it with asan and you will get all the safety, memory usage and slowness of a memory safe language.

You'd need UBsan as well, and even that doesn't catch everything. Regarding memory usage/slowness: why not OCaml, D, or Rust?

Rust only recently hit 1.0, so it's pretty obvious why somebody would not have built their software using that.

Yes, my mistake.

Also, current benchmarks show Rust to be about ~3x slower than C, making it more comparable to Go or Java.

Interesting. Do you know of any good, recent benchmarks of Rust? I haven't seen a whole lot. The Benchmarks Game mostly appears to show Rust being closer than that in general, though the Rust benchmarks seem to be kind of crap.

A few months back, we were beating C on some benchmarks, though with the focus on semantics for 1.0, I'm sure there were some regressions.

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