binfarce VS time

https://github.com/Shnatsel/binfarce if you want to see the code.

The slides claim that Naga is "Fully safe, panic-free". How do you enforce absence of panics in a project of this scale? I've written a panic-free parser before, but it was a relatively small codebase.

Besides, you can get quite far already simply by denying several clippy lints. These few lines already let me eliminate the vast majority of causes of panics and other errors in a binary format parser, and those are notoriously prone to such errors.

Clippy makes writing parsing code that's normally very tricky to get right far easier. I can eliminate most causes of panics with just a few lints.

// To load RUST_LOG from .env file. dotenv().ok(); /* On Ubuntu 22.10, calling UtcOffset's offset methods causes IndeterminateOffset error!! See also https://github.com/time-rs/time/pull/297 ... */ // TO_DO: 11 is the current number of hours the Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) // is ahead of UTC. This value need to be worked out dynamically -- if it is at all // possible on Linux!! // let guard = init_app_logger(UtcOffset::from_hms(11, 0, 0).unwrap());

The problem is that this effects higher languages too, because they often build on libc. And on some OSes, they don't have a choice, because the system call interface is unstable and/or undocumented).

For example in rust, multiple time libraries were found to be unsound if `std::env::set_env` was ever called from a multi-threaded program. See:

https://github.com/time-rs/time/issues/293 and https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/issues/499

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/27970

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/90308

On that note, it would also be good to configure cargo-deny so that a CI pipeline and any maintainer can easily audit the current dependency versions. Sometimes CVEs require a new major semver (looking at you, time 0.1.x and thus chrono 0.4.x), so it's not enough to rely on people installing the tool with semver-compatible updates. Automatically auditing dependencies is really important, and given how easy cargo-deny makes it, I don't think many projects have any excuse not to configure it.

I've come to understand that correct support for leap seconds for time computations cannot be implemented in a reliable and globally consistent manner. Here is a GitHub discussion that touches on this.

Upgrade time to 0.3

I'm not fully aware of all the history but here's what I think happened: time 0.1 was originally a minimal wrapper around libc time functions, maintained by Alex Crichton. (I seem to remember it may have been part of the std library before 1.0, but I'm not sure about that part.) In August of 2016 it was declared to no longer be actively maintained, with the README stating bugs would still get fixed.

link to source code