foundation.rust-lang.org VS rustls

Through the Fast Forward program, we give free services and support to open source projects and the nonprofits that support them. We support many of the world’s top programming languages (like Python, Rust, Ruby, and the wonderful Scratch), foundational technologies (cURL, the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, OpenStreetMap), and projects that make the internet better and more fun for everyone (Inkscape, Mastodon, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Terms of Service; Didn’t Read).

This is why some of the bigger programming languages have a consortium behind them, dedicated to maintaining the language and making decisions for its continued improvement. When you look at the logos at the bottom of the Rust Foundation page, you can see some pretty big names.

The Rust foundation, which is a nonprofit general (delaware) corporation with bylaws, employees, a normal legal existence. It owns the trademarks and domain names, acts as a legal and administrative point of contact when one is needed, and has I think operational and funding responsibility for infrastructure (crates.io, CI, etc.) The foundation has members which are almost all corporate sponsors who donate money (and sometimes people) to further its mandate. There's a fairly broad set of companies involved here: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Huawei, etc. etc.

When you say enterprise, who do you mean? Rust is absolutely being pushed by faang et al for example. Just look at the bottom of the Rust foundation page[0]. You do not see this support for things like Nim or Julia[1].

[0] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/

The Rust language is supported by the Rust Foundation, more details on that website. Financial donors to the Rust Foundation are about 30-40 companies currently, the bigger ones include Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Meta

> https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ 15,000

With all due respect, they don't need this money. Rust is a great project, and deserving, but they already have plenty of sponsors.

I would have rather seen 150 x $100 go to smaller projects. So much great software is being written, by people who are barely scraping by, and even $100 could be the motivation for someone to finish something widely useful.

So, let's clarify a couple things first about how the Rust and Cargo crates work. First off, there is no single company or entity who's the sole contributor to the core Rust tooling. Rust is an open source project to which anyone can view the codebase and contribute (though there's a select set of people who are responsible for approving changes to it and managing releases). It's worth noting this doesn't mean there isn't an organization responsible for the project however. The Rust Foundation are a non-profit who manages the core repositories and tooling, and is also responsible for setting high level goals for the language.

I don't think it is the same as Java. There is no single company owning Rust. Several big companies are investing in rust foundation (https://foundation.rust-lang.org/) including Google in particular which had quite a story regarding Java.

Recently, several big techs like Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Amazon jointly launched a non-profit organization to help the language maintain itself by giving full support to the maintainers who lead and develop the project. Here at Vaultree we use Rust in our product and services, as we need to deliver data with reliability and agility to our customers, as we are in a business line where any error or inaccuracy can be costly, the adoption of Rust was a great fit for us.

The RustTLS project is currently setting up their own CI benchmarking workflow, so I think that you could find some inspiration there: https://github.com/rustls/rustls/issues/1385 and https://github.com/rustls/rustls/issues/1205.

I also studied this question on FFI several weeks ago in terms of "rewrite part of the system in Rust". Unexpected results could be semantic issues (e.g., different error handling methods) or security issues (FFI could be a soundness hole). I suggest going through the issues of libraries that have started rewriting work such as rust-openssl or rustls (This is the one trying to rewrite in whole rust rather than using FFI; however, you will not be able to find the mapping function in the C version and compare them). I hope this helps!

Now for rust implementation of tls. Certificates can be loaded in two ways. * Finds and loads certificates using OS specific tools3 * Uses a rust implementation of webpki4 for loading with certificates5

> Ring is mostly C/Assembly

Crypto needs to be written in Assembly to ensure that operations take a constant time, regardless of input. Writing it in a high level language like C or Rust opens you up to the compiler "optimising" routines and making them no longer constant time.

But you already knew this. And you also knew that the security audit (https://github.com/rustls/rustls/blob/master/audit/TLS-01-re...) of ring was favourable

> No issues were found with regards to the cryptographic engineering of rustls or its underlying ring library. A recommendation is provided in TLS-01-001 to optionally supplement the already solid cryptographic library with another cryptographic provider (EverCrypt) with an added benefit of formally verified cryptographic primitives. Overall, it is very clear that the developers of rustls have an extensive knowledge on how to correctly implement the TLS stack whilst avoiding the common pitfalls that surround the TLS ecosystem. This knowledge has translated reliably into an implementation of exceptional quality.

You said

> a standard library with feature flags and editions would make rust ridiculously much more productive

What's the difference between opting into a library with a feature flag and opting in with a line in Cargo.toml? Let's say you want to use the de-facto regex library. Would it really be ridiculously productive if you said you wanted the "regex" feature flag instead of the "regex" crate?

I do agree that the standard library does need a versioning story so they can remove long deprecated functions. Where it gets complicated is if a new method is reintroduced using the same name in a later edition.

I used the commands listed in the .sh file here: https://github.com/rustls/rustls/tree/main/test-ca to generate keys/certs for a server and a client (with IP.1 records for SANs). I have added the local root CA to the trust store of each VM.

This is great news, this was our single biggest annoyance with rustls. One of our cloud providers choses to issue their hosted postgres instances with TLS certificates with IP addresses. Unusual, but valid per the spec, so why not. Apparently a practise that's also popular in kubernetes settings, so I'm somewhat surprised it took 5 years to close the issue, but now I can finally recommend people to use rustls without mentioning any gotchas.

I believe it is more relevant than you think: servers running in containers, web assembler tasks running in browsers, embedded devices and kernels with total control of the system, all have the ability to do something more sensible than plain out SIGABRT or similar, and in many the case is not that the complete system is falling down. For example RustTLS is looking into allowing fallible allocators and as a pretty general-purpose library that seems like a nice feature. I do wish ulimit -v worked in a sensible manner with applications.