trophy-case VS mrustc

You could check cargo-fuzz trophy case, which is a list of issues that have been found via fuzzing.

I've added it to the trophy case.

That said, what's present in what quantities under what circumstances in the Rust fuzzing trophy case does a pretty good job of illustrating how effective the Rust compiler is at ruling out entire classes of bugs.

The same fuzzing techniques applied to Rust yielded a lot of bugs as well. But in Rust's case only 7 out of 340 fuzzer-discovered bugs, or 2%, were memory corruption issues. Naturally, all of the memory corruption bugs were in unsafe code.

https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case has like 70 of my issues in it, including the nine minidump bugs

If you have found any bugs with this tool, perhaps add them to the Rust fuzz trophy case?

Source: https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case (over 40 of those are just from me).

But to bring some data, check out the fuzz trophy case. It shows that failures in Rust are most often assertions/panics (equivalent to C++ exception) with memory corruption being relatively rare (it's not never—Rust isn't promising magic—but it's a significant change).

You need to read the list more carefully.

• The list is not for Rust itself, but every program every written in Rust. By itself it doesn't mean much, unless you compare prevalence of issues among Rust programs to prevalence of issues among C programs. For some context, see how memory unsafety is rare compared to assertions and uncaught exceptions: https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case

• Many of the memory-unsafety issues are on the C FFI boundary, which is unsafe due to C lacking expressiveness about memory ownership of its APIs (i.e. it shows how dangerous is to program where you don't have the Rust borrow checker checking your code).

• Many bugs about missing Send/Sync or evil trait implementations are about type-system loopholes that prevented compiler from catching code that was already buggy. C doesn't have these guarantees in the first place, so lack of them is not a CVE for C, but just how C is designed.

No, you don't. Existential proof: mrustc ignores lifetimes. Just flat out simply ignores. It changes some corner-cases related to HRBT, yet rustc compiled by mrustc works (that's BTW mrustc exist: to bootsrap the rustc compiler).

Incidentally C++ is the only way to bootstrap rust without rust today.

https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

Well, there is mrustc[0], a Rust compiler that doesn't include a borrow-checker, so it's possible to compile (at least some versions of) Rust without a borrow checker, though it might not result in the most optimized code.

AFAIK there are some optimization like the infamous `noalias` optimization (which took several tries to get turned on[1]) that uses information established during borrow checking.

I'm also not sure what the relation with NLL (non-lexical lifetimes) is, where I would assume you would need at least a primitive borrow-checker to establish some information that the backend might be interested in. Then again, mrustc compiles Rust versions that have NLL features without a borrow-checker, so it's again probably more on the optimization side than being essential.

[0]: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57259339

> Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency.

It is possible to bootstrap rustc from just GCC relatively easily, although it's a little bit time consuming.

You can use mrustc to bootstrap Rust 1.54: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

And from then you can go through each version all the way to the current 1.72. (Each new Rust version officially needs the previous one to compile.)

Have you tried this route : https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc ?

Mrustc supports Rust 1.54.0 today

There are three. The official one, mrustc (no borrow checker, but can essentially compile the official rustc) and GCC (can't really compile anything substantial yet). Only rustc is production-ready though.

That probably depends on what you mean by problematic. Having an ever increasing chain of dependencies isn’t the most desirable situation so there has been some work to trim the bootstrap chain. In 2018, when the blogpost I linked above was written, mrustc was used to bootstrap rust 1.19.0; now mrustc can bootstrap rust 1.54.0 so the chain to recent versions is much shorter than if all those intervening versions back through 1.19.0 needed to be built. https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc