The irony of this meme being posted from a platform written in rust is pretty great ngl
A platform that is doing a great job so far but which (unfortunately) isn’t as relevant yet to call it a pillar of modern infrastructure. ;)
I like how this takes familiarity with the original xkcd comic as a given.
I get the joke, but rust is actually pretty heavily used in the backend of services theae days. Cloudflare, Amazon, Dropbox, just to randomly name a few off the top my head. Have pretty heavily invested it into their back ends for more reliable service.
Over the last one or two years I feel like Rust haters have gotten even louder than the Rust evangelists. For every person who declares “Rewrite it in Rust!” I see two or three people saying how they hate Rust or how pointless it is and so on.
I am convinced Rust haters are simply refusing to learn something new, consciously or not.
“Everyone is gunning for you when you’re at the top!”
~ someone, after CE
Rust is fearlessly upholding the whole thing even without touching it. Incredible!
Rust is actually awesome in many ways. No always the right solution, but nice to have in your toolbox.
Where would you say Rust isn’t the right solution?
We always hear how great Rust is, but I’d be curious to know where it isn’t.
Rust provides safety and protection.
Rust isn’t as rapid as other options, has less library support, and porting existing code is relatively difficult.
IMO because of the workarounds you need to do to handle the memory safety, you end up with a lot more hard to solve bugs than you do with conventional languages. It should be noted however that the bugs don’t end up being security vulnerabilities like they do in conventional systems.
If you have something that needs to be structurally sound and/or you have enough talented people willing to work on it, it’s a great option. If it needs to be fast and cheap and you don’t have a gaggle of rust developers on hand and it’s already written in another language, it might not be the best solution.
Never used Rust but I’d like to point out the YouTube channel Low Level which covers security vulnerabilities (CVEs). He ends each video with “would Rust have fixed this?” and it’s pretty interesting.
A very recent one is this: https://youtu.be/BTjj1ILCwRs?t=10m (timestamped to the relevant section)
According to him, when writing embedded software in Rust (and UEFI is embedded), you have to use Rust in unsafe mode which basically disables all the memory safety features. So in that kind of environment Rust isn’t really better than C, at least when it comes to memory safety.
That’s not to say Rust isn’t still a good option. It probably is.
Again, I never used Rust so I’m just parroting stuff I’ve heard, take all of this with a grain of salt.
Rust doesn’t have “safe” and “unsafe” modes in the sense your comment alludes to.
You can just do the little unsafe thing in a function that guarantees its safety, and then the rest of the code is safe.
For example, using C functions from rust is unsafe, but most of the time a simple wrapper can be made safe.
Example C function:
int arraysum(const int *array, int length) { int sum = 0; while (length > 0) { sum += *array; array++; length--; } }In rust, you can call that function safely by just wrapping it with a function that makes sure that
lengthis always the size ofarray. Such as:fn rust_arraysum(array: Vec<i32>) -> i32 { unsafe{ arraysum(array.as_ptr(), array.len() as i32)} }Even though
unsafeis used, it is perfectly safe to do so. And now we can callrust_arraysumwithout entering “unsafe mode”You could do similar wrappers if you want to write your embedded code. Where only a fraction of the code is potentially unsafe.
And even in unsafe blocks, you don’t disable all of the rust checks.
