rustls VS Bazel

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.

Wow, if you curl it, there's a lot of boilerplate code there.

Maybe built using Bazel?

https://bazel.build

Bazel by Google

Luckily a feature to limit the disk cache size is in development: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/5139

This is a problem that Bazel (https://bazel.build) solves in a very convenient way. You can just keep using the paths relative to the repository root, and as long as you properly declare your test needs that file it will access it without problems. Or you can use the runfile libraries to access them too.

When doing research for this lab exercise I looked at both vcpkg and conan. Both are package managers that would automate the installation and configuration of my program with its dependencies. However, when it came to releasing and sharing my program my options were limited. For example, the central public registry for conan packages is conan-center, but these packages are curated and the process is very involved. There was no way conan-center would accept a class project like mine. Alternatively, I could host a conan package on a public Artifactory repository, but accessing the package requires users to add the repository to their conan remote. This already sounded like too many steps to expect regular users to follow - I already haven't setup any conan remotes, there's no way I could expect regular users to know about conan remotes, let alone have conan installed on their system. After discussing with people online and consulting my instructor, I ultimately decided to do a GitHub release. However, in the future I was encouraged to look into using CMake or bazel.

NOTE: I won’t mention SBT and Leiningen here because, with all due respect, they are niche build tools. I also won’t discuss Kobalt for the same reason (besides, it’s no longer actively maintained). Additionally, I won’t touch upon Bazel and Buck in this context, mainly because I’m not very familiar with them. If you have insights or comments about these tools, please feel free to share them in the comments 👇

> None of this solves C's only REAL problem (in my opinion) which is the lack of dependency management.

Bazel solves this really nicely, I know some people have strong opinions on it but I cannot recommend it enough

https://bazel.build/