watt VS cargo-deny

The precompiled binary is not a sandboxed WASM binary. Despite the name "watt" it has nothing to do with https://github.com/dtolnay/watt . You can look at the actual code to see for yourself.

* Related: watt is one approach to pre-compile proc-macro crates using WASM.

In addition to thiserror and anyhow, our resident superhuman Rust-improving Robot, dtolnay, also developed an experiment in distributing precompiled proc macros as WebAssembly named Watt and, though I never bothered to create a Zulip account so I don't know what was said, I'm told there has been discussion around the idea of implementing something in that vein.

I think when we have Cranelift, Mold, and maybe Watt all working together then compile times will basically be a non-issue. It'll be a few years though.

Check out https://github.com/dtolnay/watt - it's a really interesting solution to the problem!

I really like the idea of Watt: https://github.com/dtolnay/watt Run macros in a wasm sandbox so they can't touch anything you don't explicitly allow.

I really wish there was more interest in getting something like Watt upstreamed.

Tip: You can check the licenses of all your dependencies (recursively) using cargo-deny: https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/cargo-deny

cargo-deny

cargo-deny can help block specified versions of a crate and even has some advisory features that can probably used to block crate with reported vulnerabilities

cargo deny for fetching crates only from trusted sources, blacklisting crates, etc.

Use cargo audit or cargo deny to check the crates in your Cargo.lock to ensure they don't contain any vulnerabilities.

> Explain the crate scanner thing?

I assume a reference to tools that help manage potential issues around dependencies, e.g.:

* https://github.com/rustsec/rustsec/tree/main/cargo-audit

* https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/cargo-deny

"[cargo-audit] Audit Cargo.lock files for crates with security vulnerabilities reported to the RustSec Advisory Database."

"cargo-deny is a cargo plugin that lets you lint your project's dependency graph to ensure all your dependencies conform to your expectations and requirements." e.g. license, security advisories, source.

cargo-deny does license and security advisory checking, and cargo-geiger does unsafe checking.

cargo-deny

OpenSSL has been banned in our project for a variety of reasons via cargo-deny for around a year and half, it was actually one of the reasons we created it in the first place.