Wuffs Alternatives

wuffs reviews and mentions

• Google assigns a CVE for libwebp and gives it a 10.0 score
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023

  One example for a safer language developed at Google: https://github.com/google/wuffs

  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023

  There are already huffman-decoding and some parts of webp algorithms in https://github.com/google/wuffs (language that finds missing bounds checks during compilations). In contrary, according to readme, this language allows to write more optimized code (compared to C). WEBP decoding is stated as a midterm target in the roadmap.

• The WebP 0day
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Sep 2023

  Specifically, since performance is crucial for this type of work, it should be written in WUFFS. WUFFS doesn't emit bounds checks (as Java does and as Rust would where it's unclear why something should be in bounds at runtime) it just rejects programs where it can't see why the indexes are in-bounds.

  https://github.com/google/wuffs

  You can explicitly write the same checks and meet this requirement, but chances are since you believe you're producing a high performance piece of software which doesn't need checks you'll instead be pulled up by the fact the WUFFS tooling won't accept your code and discover you got it wrong.

  This is weaker than full blown formal verification, but not for the purpose we care about in program safety, thus a big improvement on humans writing LGTM.

• What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Sep 2023

  > parsing encoded files tends to introduce vulnerabilities

  If we are talking about binary formats, now there are systematic solutions like https://github.com/google/wuffs that protect against vulnerabilities. But SQLite is not just a format - it's an evolving ecosystem with constantly added features. And the most prominent issue was not even in core, it was in FTS3. What will SQLite add next? More json-related functions? Maybe BSON? It is useful, but does not help in this situation.

  Regarding traces, there are many forensics tools and even books about forensic analysis of SQLite databases. In well-designed format such tools should not exist in the first place. This is hard requirement: if it requires rewriting the whole file - then so be it.

• CVE-2023-4863: Heap buffer overflow in WebP (Chrome)
  18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2023

  I agree that Wuffs [1] would have been a very good alternative! If it can be made more generally. AFAIK Wuffs is still very limited, in particular it never allows dynamic allocation. Many formats, including those supported by Wuffs the library, need dynamic allocation, so Wuffs code has to be glued with unverified non-Wuffs code [2]. This only works with simpler formats.

  [1] https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/main/doc/wuffs-the-lang...

  [2] https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/main/doc/note/memory-sa...

• NSO Group iPhone Zero-Click, Zero-Day Exploit Captured in the Wild
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2023

  There are efforts to do that, notably https://github.com/google/wuffs

  RLBox is another interesting option that lets you sandbox C/C++ code.

  I think the main reason is that security is one of those things that people don't care about until it is too late to change. They get to the point of having a fast PDF library in C++ that has all the features. Then they realise that they should have written it in a safer language but by that point it means a complete rewrite.

  The same reason not enough people use Bazel. By the time most people realise they need it, you've already implemented a huge build system using Make or whatever.

• FaaS in Go with WASM, WASI and Rust
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 May 2023

  Here's an off-topic answer.

  Depends on what you want your toy language to do and what sort of runtime support you'd like to lean on.

  JVM is pretty good for a lot of script-y languages, does impose overhead of having a JVM around. Provides GC, Threads, Reflection, consistent semantics. Tons of tools, libraries, support.

  WebAssembly is constrained (for running-in-a-browser safety reasons) but then you get to run your code in a browser, or as a service, etc, and Other People are working hard on the problem of getting your WA to go fast. That used to be a big reason for using JVM, but it turns out that Security Is Darn Hard.

  I have used C in the (distant) past as an IL, and that works up to a point, implementing garbage collection can be a pain if that's a thing that you want. C compilers have had a lot of work on them over the years, and you also have access to some low-level stuff, so if you were E.G. trying to come up with a little language that had super-good performance, C might be a good choice. (See also, [Wuffs](https://github.com/google/wuffs), by Nigel Tao et al at Google).

  A suggestion, if you do target C -- don't work too hard to find isomorphisms between C's data structures and YourToyLang's data structures. Back around 1990, I did my C-generating compiler for Modula-3, and a friend at Xerox PARC used C as a target for Cedar Mesa, and Hans used it in a lower-level way (so I was mapping between M-3 records and C structs, for example, Hans was not) and the lower-level way worked better -- i.e., I chose poorly. It worked, but lower-level worked better.

  If you are targeting a higher-level language, Rust and Go both seem like interesting options to me. Both have the disadvantage that they are still changing slightly but you get interesting "services" from the underlying VM -- for Rust, the borrow checker, plus libraries, for Go, reflection, goroutines, and the GC, plus libraries.

  Rust should get you slightly higher performance, but I'd worry that you couldn't hide the existence of the borrow checker from your toy language, especially if you wanted to interact with Rust libraries from YTL. If you wanted to learn something vaguely publishable/wider-interesting, that question right there ("can I compile a TL to Rust, touch the Rust libraries, and not expose the borrow checker? No+what-I-tried/Yes+this-worked") is not bad.

  I have a minor conflict of interest suggesting Go; I work on Go, usually on the compiler, and machine-generated code makes great test data. But regarded as a VM, I am a little puzzled why it hasn't seen wider use, because the GC is great (for lower-allocation rates than Java however; JVM GC has higher throughout efficiency, but Go has tagless objects, interior pointer support, and tiny pause times. Go-the-language makes it pretty easy to allocate less.) Things Go-as-a-VM currently lacks:

  - tail call elimination (JVM same)

• Don't carelessly rely on fixed-size unsigned integers overflow
  7 projects | /r/C_Programming | 24 Jan 2023

  Because if you couldn't prevent creation of pointers from the thin air (e.g. by sending them to remove server and then pulling them from said server) then you can not prove anything of that sort and if you limit such operations then you are starting journey on the road to Rust or Wuffs!

  7 projects | /r/C_Programming | 24 Jan 2023

  They do improve it. You just have to write your code in a way that it wouldn't trigger UB. Google Wuffs is an attempt to make it possible and it achieves good results.

• Checked C
  14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Dec 2022

  That sounds a bit like what WUFFS is doing

  WUFFS: https://github.com/google/wuffs

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