MSRC-Security-Research VS Cargo

You’ll find more primary sources across different organizations that all arrive at the 60 - 70% number. But what really grinds my gears here is that you take a piece from the article you’re criticizing and pretend that it’s a quote from Matt Miller.

It’s actually quite easy to find a primary source here because the slides from the talk that the article is based on are available: https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

To quote from those slides: „~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues“.

> It's still bizarre though that Rust is capturing such ridiculous mindshare.

I don't think it's that bizarre. The two big headline features that bring Rust such popularity are: #1 "70% of bugs are memory-safety bugs" [1] and Rust can help solve those, and #2 C/C++ have a couple of package manager solutions - none of which have critical mass and Rust "comes with" cargo.

Those two make me really eager to continue experimenting with Rust.

> It seems to be a temporary low-level programming zeitgeist driven by YouTube and Reddit recommendation algorithms to an audience that has never done it and probably never will.

This is some weird gatekeep-y kinda thing. Most of us didn't start out with low-level programming. Wouldn't it have been odd and frustrating for someone to tell your younger self that you have "never written C and probably never will"?

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research

https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

Windows is likely a big task for the same reasons as SMAP (https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...). XNU should be comparable to FreeBSD, which CheriBSD is a fork of, as both use Mach's VM for memory management and have a bunch of shared code in various places, but userspace is more of an unknown quite how much effort it'd be (you'll need to port Objective-C and, now, Swift, for example). For Chromium we have ported WebKit, so I'd imagine Blink isn't too dissimilar. V8 is likely interesting, though we have a version of WebKit's JSC JIT for Morello, which gives confidence in V8 being doable.

A related post from Google Security Blog[0]:

> "A recent study[1] found that "~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues.” Another analysis on security issues in the ubiquitous `curl` command line tool showed that 53 out of 95 bugs would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language. [...]"

[0]: https://security.googleblog.com/2021/02/mitigating-memory-sa...

[1]: https://github.com/Microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

Here is some of the internal advocacy going on at Microsoft.

- Managed languages if you can afford a GC

- Rust

- C++ with Core Guidelines

https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/tree/mas...

Note that there are still some teams like Azure Sphere and Azure RTOS, which are only providing C based SDKs, so no everyone is on the same wave length.

Installing Trunk happens through Cargo. Remember, Cargo is more than a package manager, it also supports sub-commands.

Dependency Management in Other Languages: We've discussed Python and Node.js in this article, but dependency management is a universal concept in programming. Exploring how you handle dependencies in other languages like Java, C#, or Rust could be beneficial. (I think Rust's cargo is an excellent example of a package manager.)

Nice hack! Would it have been possible back then to use cargo to pull in some dependencies?

The clean solution of cargo script is here: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/12207

Yes, I am sure this is going to be a part of Rust 1.77.0 and it will release on 21st March. I say that because of the tag in the PR (https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/13257#event-11505613...).

I'm no expert on Rust compiler development, but my understanding is that all code that is merged into master is available on nightly. If they're not behind a feature flag (this one isn't), they'll be available in a full release within 12 weeks of being merged. Larger features that need a lot more testing remain behind feature flags. Once they are merged into master, they remain on nightly until they're sufficiently tested. The multi-threaded frontend (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/11/09/parallel-rustc.html) is an example of such a feature. It'll remain nightly only for several months.

Again, I'm not an expert. This is based on what I've observed of Rust development.

The author provides very surface-level criticism of two Rust tools, but they don't look into why those choices were made.

With about five minutes of my time, I found out:

wrap_comments was introduced in 2019 [0]. There are bugs in the implementation (it breaks Markdown tables), so the option hasn't been marked as stable. Progress on the issue has been spotty.

--no-merge-sources is not trivial to re-implement [1]. The author has already explained why the flag no longer works -- Cargo integrated the command, but not all of the flags. This commit [2] explains why this functionality was removed in the first place.

Rust is open source, so the author of this blog post could improve the state of the software they care about by championing these issues. The --no-merge-sources error message even encourages you to open an issue, presumably so that the authors of Cargo can gauge the importance of certain flags/features.

You could even do something much simpler, like adding a comment to the related issues mentioning that you ran into these rough edges and that it made your life a little worse, or with a workaround that you found.

Alternatively, you can continue to write about how much free software sucks.

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt/issues/3347

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/10344

[2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/commit/3842d8e6f20067f716...

You try to use it as a part of multi-language project, with an external build tool to tie it all together, and you discover that --out-dir flag is still not stabilized over some future compatibility concerns.

To create a new application we'll use cargo (a build tool and also a package manager for Rust. It is used for scaffolding new library/binary projects). So in your projects folder, you can run this command in your terminal:

> ...but at the end of the day Cargo is the reason that Rust is popular.

FWIW, maybe that's true for you, but there are numerous other advantages to the language for which many people choose to use Rust--some even "despite" Cargo: you see Google having had to put in way way WAY too much work to get Bazel working for Rust :/--that it honestly feels a bit like belittling an extremely important language to make this claim so flippantly.

> You can set a default build target for a Cargo project with two lines of configuration, no nightly features necessary...

This doesn't work as, as soon as you start setting target-specific options, it infects the host build, as they incorrectly modelled the problem as some kind of map from targets to flags. If you don't believe me, on your Linux computer, try cross-compile something complicated that will runs on a "least common denominator" Linux distribution, such as CentOS 7.

> Can you clarify what this is referring to?

Sure. I've Googled rust cargo target host bugs for you (which, FWIW, finds a number of bugs I've filed or have talked about, but it isn't as if I have a list anywhere). Note that one of these bugs is "closed", but I still provide them for context as a patch might have been merged but (as you'll find out if you read through all of these) it isn't stable.

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/8147

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/3349

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9322

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/9453

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9753

The result of this work being left incomplete is that increasingly large numbers of "serious" projects--things I'd expect people in packaging land to have heard of, such as BuildRoot--are being forced to set the ridiculous environment variable __CARGO_TEST_CHANNEL_OVERRIDE_DO_NOT_USE_THIS="nightly" in order to get access to a flag that makes Cargo sort of work.

(And yet, I often see people surprised at how long it is taking for various of the more important clients to fully get into using Rust, as the safety issues are so severe from continuing to use C/C++: as you made the contention that you believe the reason why people use Rust is Cargo, I will say the opposite: the reason why we don't see more Rust is also Cargo.)