Rustig Alternatives

Reviews and mentions

• Three Things Go Needs More Than Generics
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Oct 2021

  > Doesnt Rust have implicit panics on indexing out of bounds?

  It does yes. A fair number of other constructs can panic as well.

  > I wonder if any codebases lint those away.

  Clippy has a lint for indexing so probably.

  For the general case, it's almost impossible unless you're working on very low-level software (embedded, probably kernel-rust eventually) e.g. `std` assumes allocations can't fail, so any allocation will show up as a panic path.

  https://github.com/Technolution/rustig can actually uncover panic paths, but because of the above the results are quite noisy, and while it's possible to uncover bugs thanks to rustig it requires pretty ridiculous amounts of filtering.

• Linus Torvalds on Rust support in kernel
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Apr 2021

  This comment is strongly confused.

  > [1] https://github.com/Technolution/rustig

  That's a binary analysis tool. It is only approximate, and does not claim to be an accurate analysis like unsafe-checking and typechecking are:

  https://github.com/Technolution/rustig#limitations

  > All paths leading to panic! from one of those functions (whether actually used or not) will be reported.

  It also only works on x86_64 binaries.

  Panics are an ugly leftover from the bad old days before Rust had nice monad-like syntax for Result error-handling (the "?" syntax). It's time for panic to sunset.

  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Apr 2021

  This comment is strongly missinformed:

  1- panicking allocations are here to stay, because in lots of case, it's the most convenient behavior. BUT Rust is adding fallible allocations methods (prefixed with try_) which return a result instead of panicking in allocation failure.

  2- panics are catch-able as long as you don't compile your binary with panic=abort setting (and as long as you don't panic in your panic handler itself)

  3- panics can only occur in specific places (array indexing, allocations, utf-8 validation, unwrap, etc.) which are by definition known at compile-time, and there's tooling to catch these up [1].

  In practice, a might_panic annotation would add a lot of noise for pretty much everybody, because most of us mortals use panicking function all days and it's not a big deal. Obviously it is critical for Linux, but because it's relevant only to the minority of rust users, it doesn't make sense to include it in rustc itself: it's exactly the kind of situation where external tooling is the good option.

  [1] https://github.com/Technolution/rustig