alt Hacker NewsThis is what the Rust advocates have been trying to say for a decade now. But C enthusiasts would always chime in that those bugs were just caused by careless devs and a real C programmer is fine.
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AdamN • today at 8:57 AM
A 'real' C programmer probably is fine .... but that's like 1% of the population of developers outputting C programs.
And now you have AI that's learned from the other 99% so nothing's changing anytime soon.
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imtringued • today at 2:09 PM
Yes but even if you swipe the Rust magic wand and somehow reduce the vulnerabilities by 99%, you are still left with 20 critical vulnerabilities per year.
There is something about kernels that make them easy targets and it's not just the language.
Rust eliminates some bug classes, but we don't even know yet how many of these vulns would've been prevented by using Rust.
It's also possible that we'd need even more architectural changes to avoid such bugs.
The idea of a microkernel suddenly becomes more appealing...