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points by pheggs 3 days ago | 0 comments
Don't get me wrong, I think rust has some great features and does some things extraordinarily good. But at the same time I can see that for 99% of cases it's just as prone to bugs, including security and supply chain attacks, as any other language. I think I could just as much argue that any "->" is clearly de-referencing that needs checking, which is also pretty easy to see.
[–] slopinthebag 2 days ago
this is theoretically, empirically, and objectively wrong. akin to saying that you can get into an accident in a truck as well as a motorcycle, so in 99% of cases there is no difference in safety.
[–] pheggs 2 days ago
different kind of programming languages change the kinds of bugs and their properties, but it does not change the amount of bugs per line of code. in respect to C and rust for example, rust may have less memory bugs - which LLMs seems to be able to spot now - but it did increase supply chain attacks for example.
[–] orf 2 days ago
> but it does not change the amount of bugs per line of code

You are really uninformed: different programming languages have very different volumes of bugs per line of code

[–] pheggs 2 days ago
With all the respect but I don't think I am: https://arxiv.org/html/1901.10220v2
[–] slopinthebag 2 days ago
that only tries to show a single study is flawed, nothing else

do you think bugs/loc is the same between brainfuck and rust?

[–] pheggs 2 days ago
> that only tries to show a single study is flawed, nothing else

no the study failed to show any difference in bug count for a specific set of common used languages, where C and Python were both part of the dataset.

I don't think programming languages have a big impact on bugs per line when every line is written by a human. Now given that I was talking about bug counts, not severity.

[–] slopinthebag 2 days ago
it showed errors in the methodology of an earlier study, it did not produce a novel result.

kind of reminds me how the "research" suggests that there are no practical differences between dynamically typed and statically typed languages...except we know from practical experience that there is, and the literature there is horribly flawed.

we have real-world evidence that rust leads to significantly less bugs in the real world

https://blog.google/security/rust-in-android-move-fast-fix-t...

[–] K0nserv 2 days ago
Agree to disagree I guess :)