creusot VS gcc

However, it seems that C is not "notified" whether --cfg thing is set, only the main crate being built is. Regardless of this flag, the dummy macro is always chosen. Am I doing something wrong? It should work; the Creusot project is doing something similar.

I believe https://github.com/xldenis/creusot is more similar in that it also uses proofs to prove rust code correct.

Wow that sounds really cool! I'm not an expert but does that mean that one day you could implement dependend types or refinement types in Rust as a crate ? I currently only know of tools like: Flux Creusot Kani Prusti

Easy reasoning does not end on memory safety. For example, deductive verification of Rust code is possible exactly because there's no reference aliasing in safe Rust

> No support for using something like separation logic within Rust itself to verify that unsafe code upholds the invariants that the safe language expects.

I think this is something we might see in the future. There are a lot of formal methods people who are interested in rust. Creusot in particular is pretty close to doing this - at least for simpler invariants

https://github.com/xldenis/creusot

Seems similar in principle to cruesot except as another language instead of as a layer on-top of rust.

You often encounter this entire thread of rhetoric when someone wants to put a diversion into the central argument, yeah but it doesn't ____.

But Rust does do that, match exhaustiveness, forcing the handling of errors and the type system enables things like CreuSAT [1] using creusot [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31780128

[2] https://github.com/xldenis/creusot

> Creusot works by translating Rust code to WhyML, the verification and specification language of Why3. Users can then leverage the full power of Why3 to (semi)-automatically discharge the verification conditions!

Units of Measure, https://github.com/iliekturtles/uom

The base properties of the language enable things that can never be done in C++.

> I’ve been working on a tool: https://github.com/xldenis/creusot to put this into practice

Note that there are other tools trying to deal with formal statements about Rust code. AIUI, Rust developers are working on forming a proper working group for pursuing these issues. We might get a RFC-standardized way of expressing formal/logical conditions about Rust code, which would be a meaningful first step towards supporting proof-carrying code within Rust.

This is exciting! I've met with people from AdaCore and Ferrous systems (individually) several times and they're all serious, competent and motivated.

I'm curious what kinds of software they want to (eventually) verify, my PhD thesis is developing a verification tool for Rust (https://github.com/xldenis/creusot) and I'm always on the look out for case studies to push me forward.

The road to formally verified Rust is still long but in my unbiased opinion looking quite bright, especially compared to other languages like C.

As far as I know, libstdc++'s representation has two advantages:

First, it simplifies the implementation of `s.data()`, because you hold a pointer that invariably points to the first character of the data. The pointer-less version needs to do a branch there. Compare libstdc++ [1] to libc++ [2].

[1]: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/065dddc/libstdc++-v3/...

[2]: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/1a96179/libcxx/inc...

Basically libstdc++ is paying an extra 8 bytes of storage, and losing trivial relocatability, in exchange for one fewer branch every time you access the string's characters. I imagine that the performance impact of that extra branch is tiny, and massively confounded in practice by unrelated factors that are clearly on libc++'s side (e.g. libc++'s SSO buffer is 7 bytes bigger, despite libc++'s string object itself being smaller). But it's there.

The second advantage is that libstdc++ already did it that way, and to change it would be an ABI break; so now they're stuck with it. I mean, obviously that's not an "advantage" in the intuitive sense; but it's functionally equivalent to an advantage, in that it's a very strong technical answer to the question "Why doesn't libstdc++ just switch to doing it libc++'s way?"

Upd: searching in the github mirror by the commit hash from the issue, found that https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commit/1e3312a25a7b34d6e3f... is in fact in the 'releases/gcc-14.1.0' tag.

Even weirder that this one got swept under the changelog rug, it's a pretty major issue.

> It's true, this was a CVE in Rust and not a CVE in C++, but only because C++ doesn't regard the issue as a problem at all. The problem definitely exists in C++, but it's not acknowledged as a problem, let alone fixed.

Can you find a link that substantiates your claim? You're throwing out some heavy accusations here that don't seem to match reality at all.

Case in point, this was fixed in both major C++ libraries:

https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commit/ebf6175464768983a2d...

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/4f67a909902d8ab9...

So what C++ community refused to regard this as an issue and refused to fix it? Where is your supporting evidence for your claims?

Somewhat related: In 2020 gcc bumped the requirement for bootstrapping to be a C++11 compiler [0]. Would have been fun to see the kernel finally adopt C++14 as the author suggested.

I don't think that Linus will allow this since he just commented that he will allow rust in drivers and major subsystems [1].

I do found it pretty funny that even Linus is also not writing any rust code, but is reading rust code.

I would have hoped see more answers or see something in here from actual kernel developers.

0: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commit/5329b59a2e13dabbe20...

> They’re saying that a lot of the restrictions makes things much harder than other languages. Hence the general problem rust has where a lot of trivial tasks in other languages are extremely challenging.

Like what? So far the discussion has revolved around rewriting a linked list, which people generally shouldn't ever need to do because it's included in the standard lib for most languages. And it's a decidedly nontrivial task to do as well as the standard lib when you don't sacrifice runtime overhead to be able to handwave object lifecycle management.

- C++: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/libstdc%2B%2B-...

- Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/src/alloc/collections/linked_...

> No need to get defensive, no one is arguing that rust doesn’t do a lot of things well.

That's literally what bsaul is arguing in another comment. :)

> You’re talking up getting a safe implementation in C, but what matters is “can I get the same level of safety with less complexity in any language”, and the answer is yes: Java and c# implementations of a thread safe linked list are trivial.

Less perceived complexity. In Java and C# you're delegating the responsibility of lifecycle management to garbage collectors. For small to medium scale web apps, the added complexity will be under the hood and you won't have to worry about it. For extreme use cases, the behavior and overhead of the garbage collector does became relevant.

If you factor in the code for the garbage collector that Java and C# depend on, the code complexity will tilt dramatically in favor of C++ or Rust.

However, it's going to be non-idiomatic to rewrite a garbage collector in Java or C# like it is to rewrite a linked list in Rust. If we consider the languages as they're actually used, rather than an academic scenario which mostly crops up when people expect the language to behave like C or Java, the comparison is a lot more favorable than you're framing it as.

> If I wanted I could do it in c++ though the complexity would be more than c# and Java it would be easier than rust.

You can certainly write a thread-safe linked list in C++, but then the enforcement of any assumptions you made about using it will be a manual burden on the user. This isn't just a design problem you can solve with more code - C++ is incapable of expressing the same restrictions as Rust, because doing so would break compatibility with C++ code and the language constructs needed to do so don't exist.

So it's somewhat apples and oranges here. Yes, you may have provided your team with a linked list, but it will either

GCC is also written in C++, and has had C++ deps since 2013:

https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/c/c-parser...

Compliers/Interpreters are also very commonly open source (here is the source code for a popular C compiler). That means you can even modify the compiler's code and change its behavior if you wanted to.