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Is it possible you’ve misunderstood what Rust promises?

> It isn't possible to create a programing language that doesn't allow bugs to happen

Yes, that’s true. No one doubts this. Except you seem to think that Rust promises no bugs at all? I don’t know where you got this impression from, but it is incorrect.

Rust promises that certain kinds of bugs like use-after-free are much, much less likely. It eliminates some kinds of bugs, not all bugs altogether. It’s possible that you’ve read the claim on kinds of bugs, and misinterpreted it as all bugs.

I’ve had this conversation before, and it usually ends like https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah


"Rust" obviously does not promise that.

On the other hand, there are too many less-experienced Rust fans who do claim that "Rust" promises this and that any project that does not use Rust is doomed and that any of the existing decades-old software projects should be rewritten in Rust to decrease the chances that they may have bugs.

What is described in TFA is not surprising at all, because it is exactly what has been predicted about this and other similar projects.

Anyone who desires to rewrite in Rust any old project, should certainly do it. It will be at least a good learning experience and whenever an ancient project is rewritten from scratch, the current knowledge should enable the creation of something better than the original.

Nonetheless, the rewriters should never claim that what they have just produced has currently less bugs than the original, because neither they nor Rust can guarantee this, but only a long experience with using the rewritten application.

Such rewritten software packages should remain for years as optional alternatives to the originals. Any aggressive push to substitute the originals immediately is just stupid (and yes, I have seen people trying to promote this).

Moreover, someone who proposes the substitution of something as basic as coreutils, must first present to the world the results of a huge set of correctness tests and performance benchmarks comparing the old package with the new package, before the substitution idea is even put forward.


The only language I've ever seen users make that claim for is Haskell. Rust users have never made the claim, but I've seen it a lot from advocates who appear to find "hello world" a complex hard to write program.

Where are these rust fans? Are they in the room with us right now?

You’ve constructed a strawman with no basis in reality.

You know what actual Rust fans sound like? They sound like Matthias Endler, who wrote the article we’re discussing. Matthias hosts a popular podcast Rust in Production where talks with people about sharp edges and difficulties they experienced using Rust.

A true Rust advocate like him writes articles titled “Bugs Rust Won’t Catch”.

> Such rewritten software packages should remain for years as optional alternatives to the originals.

This project was started a decade ago. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882211)

> must first present to the world the results of a huge set of correctness tests and performance benchmarks

Yeah, you can see those in https://github.com/uutils/coreutils. This project has also worked with GNU coreutils maintainers to add more tests over time. Check out the graph where the total number of tests increases over time.

> before the substitution idea is even put forward

I partly agree. But notice that these CVEs come from a thorough security audit paid for by Canonical. Canonical is paying for it because they have a plan to substitute in the immediate future.

Without a plan to substitute it’s hard to advocate for funding. Without funding it’s hard to find and fix these issues. With these issues unfixed it’s hard to plan to substitute.

Chicken and egg problem.

> less bugs

Fewer.


Those Rust fans exist on almost all Internet forums that I have seen, including on HN.

I do not care about what they say, so I have not made a list with links to what they have posted. But even only on HN, I certainly have seen much more than one hundred of such postings, more likely at least several hundreds, even on threads that did not have any close relationship with Rust, so there was no reason to discuss Rust.

Since the shameless promotion with false claims of Java by Sun, during the last years of the previous century, there has not been any other programming language affected by such a hype campaign.

I think that this is sad. Rust has introduced a few valid innovations and it is a decent programming language. Despite this, whenever someone starts mentioning Rust, my first reaction is to distrust whatever is said, until proven otherwise, because I have seen far too many ridiculous claims about Rust.


Could you find one such person on this thread? Someone making ridiculous claims about what Rust offers.

I’ll tell you what I think you’ve seen - there are hundreds of threads where you’ve seen people claim they’ve seen this everywhere. That gives you the impression that it is universal.



Perfect. Because that’s exactly what I’m saying.

The comment you linked says something specific about a specific kind of bug being eliminated - memory safety bugs. And they’re not making a claim, they’re repeating the evidence gathered from the Android codebase. So that’s a fact, memory safety bugs truly did not appear in the Rust parts of Android.

The comment you linked is not claiming Rust code is bug-free. That’s a strawman I’ve seen many, many times. Haters will claim that this happens all the time, but all I see are examples of the haters claiming this. You had to go back 5 months and still couldn’t find anything similar to the strawman.

> This one probably covers it

No, probably not.


> On the other hand, there are too many less-experienced Rust fans who do claim that "Rust" promises this

Link some comments like this? Because I've been reading Rust discussions for years and never seen them.


I understand the (narrow) hard guarantees that rust gives. But there there are people in the wider community who think that the guarantees are much, much broader. This is a pretty widespread misconception that should get be rectified.

Who are these people? Care to share examples?

Because all I see are examples of people claiming it happens all the time. Not the examples of it actually happening.


There are large groups of people have very strongly negative opinions about one side or the other in Israel-Palestine.

Only a tiny fraction of people in Europe or North America could point to Sudan on the map. And even fewer could explain the differences between the factions involved. There’s no simple good-guys-vs-bad-guys rhetoric that’s easy to join.


I mean, the RSF is very clearly the bad guys in this conflict. The reason there is no coverage is that there is widespread agreement on this point, and western govts aren't directly funding the bad guys as is the case with Israel.

Another reason there's no coverage is nobody in Sudan has the social media expertise and budget that Iran has.

Both side are the “bad side.” The RSF just wins the award of being the “worst.”

I don't get it, why? RSF fights on Ukrainian side, SAF on Russian since 2024. It's the SAF that's the bad guy now. They flipped.

How did you manage to make a civil war in sudan about a european conflict? Neither plays much role at all compared to the gulf states and eritrea/ethiopia.

western governments funding Israel?

What western governments exactly? Isn't Israel capable of funding itself through its own economy?


America hands out military aid to Israel. Coupons that can be redeemed for weapons with American manufacturers. It’s a subsidy to Israel and to American military primes. This comes to billions each year.

That’s one government though. I can’t think of any other western government funding Israel in a similar way.


"That’s one government though. I can’t think of any other western government funding Israel in a similar way."

My point, exactly!


Germany, Great Britain, Finland, many other European partners.

They are purchasing military equipment from Israel, funding their development. Many European institutions also have investments in Israel. And arms used in the Palestinian genocide are being produced in European countries.


I don’t think that would be the common meaning of funding. Funding doesn’t mean “have a commercial relationship with”.

It's not just a commercial relationship, Israel is dependent on US subsidies and European trade to fund its war effort, and Europe has shown itself to be very slow at reacting to the genocide.

Effectively Europes stance is funding the genocide. Whether a lawyer would consider this funding is besides the point. I think there are very concrete ways to argue that what Europe does would constitute funding, but I don't particularly care about that semantic argument. The main point is that Europes actions support the genocide.


[flagged]


There are thousands of videos of Israel murdering children.

You know what happens if an Israeli soldier is caught killing non-combatants? They get prosecuted.

You know what happens to a Hamas fighter that is caught killing non-combatants? They get a promotion.


Well they don’t get caught. Either that or small children are enemy combatants.

Russia operates the same way. Everyone is a nazi according to them.


Israeli soldiers do nothing but kill civilians. They aren’t prosecuted, genocide is literally the foundation of Israel.

"The IDF doesn't want to kill children", he says.

I’d say India has done really well, and that’s partly in credit to the British. A lot of the infrastructure that India used to succeed was inherited from the Raj, such as a professional Army that has never interfered in politics, a competent Civil Service, a Parliamentary style system where minorities have had a reasonable say.

Most important of all, and directly attributable to British influence was getting rid of princely states that owed their allegiance to the British crown. Britain made it clear that they would not accept independent states and every princely state would have to accede to India or Pakistan.

Britain really tried to help India (and Pakistan) succeed. The blame for some of the failures and mistakes can’t be attributed to the British (Indian economic policy before 1991, Pakistani policy towards Bengali speakers), but they deserve partial credit for the political and economic success of India.

People who aren’t Indian can’t understand how remarkable it is that India has stayed united and functional. Even Indians who haven’t lived outside India underestimate it. Indians have diversity within similar to Europe, but the country remains united. A big part of that is that the current Indian state is a successor to the British Raj, which in turn was a successor to the Mughal Raj. The longer India is ruled from Delhi, the more normal it feels.

This unity is the source of Indian success. Without it India would resemble Africa more than Europe. More resources would have been wasted fighting wars within India and all of India would still be struggling with poverty, famine and starvation instead of manufacturing iPhones.

People often caricature this argument by saying sO wHaT iF tHeY bUiLt RaIlWaYs. The Railways don’t matter, they could have been built earlier or later. But once a polity fractures and blood has been spilt, there’s no fixing that.


Could you share a link to where he promotes race science?


This one is more direct than most, but comments about the subject are not uncommon on the older blog. I think reading this material is why the journalist turned against him but never stated why. "Psychiatrist has dozens of charts on their secret personal blog comparing the achievements of different sub-ethnicities in Israel" is a headline you might try to hide out of politeness to the uninvolved.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/four-nobel-truths/

(How can anyone who has read slatestarcodex not know?)


What's wrong with comparing the achievements of different sub-ethnicities in Israel? What's wrong with talking about any real phenomena? Is the assumption that he must have a hidden bad-faith agenda?


It's against the current ruling dogma to question that human beings are interchangeable cogs that are all ready to be placed into the machine wherever needed.


> It's against the current ruling dogma to question that human beings are interchangeable cogs that are all ready to be placed into the machine wherever needed.

It’s because the machine is their god. Service to the machine provides your value, and by extension your right to exist. If someone is no longer capable of the serving the machine, they are discard. What that looks like exactly is not pretty

Some people are inherently incapable of proving more value to the machine than they consume. What is to be done with these “extra” people?


Who's they? The subset of politically correct types who reject the idea of universal human dignity and instead tie your moral worth to material output, but still keep insisting that everyone's equal? Honestly I don't think it's a large group.


Now we just need that AI booster guy to join this thread and tell us that actually this is super impressive. He was doing that for that worthless “browser” that Cursor built.


For sure. Getting shady vibes from ente. I’ll be avoiding them.


Ok I checked privacyguides.

Here’s where it was added to PrivacyGuides - https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/issues/36.... The person opening the issue is the CEO of ente. So the CEO of ente gets his company mentioned in PrivacyGuides back when it was new and that makes it more legit?


PrivacyGuides goes through their own process of vetting (whether you would agree with their process or not that’s another topic) so I think the discussion to add Ente Photos is the more relevant link https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/ente-photo-management/11...


> PrivacyGuides goes through their own process of vetting ... so I think the discussion

The discussion is not all that relevant as PrivacyGuides does not rely solely on community input. The core team pretty much generates content and lists recommendations based on (what they claim is) their own research (which isn't saying much).

  The forum and community really give us a lot of external insights, with the voting system letting us poll how popular something is. 

  While we put a very heavy importance on the community consensus, it is mostly up to the team to decide what comes and goes, where more heavy decisions require more votes...

  A reason why it has never really been written out is that policies can be gamed, and the team really wants to be able to veto decisions...

  As far as "evaluating"/reviewing tools the methods to do so are not documented...
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/32774


Not saying they’re a paid promoter. But if I paid someone to speak about my newly launched product, they’d say something exactly like that. “Never heard of these guys before, but I loved their other product you’ve never heard of. I’m super excited to try this one!”


I do appreciate you quoting Shakespeare.


Why is there always a both sides-er in these discussions?

FWIW, one party generally deferred to nonpartisan commissions to draw boundaries to avoid gerrymandering. So one “side” did far more than propose a solution, they did the right thing even when the other side wasn’t.

Gerrymandering is the worst example to pick when you’re pushing both-sides-bad.


Great! So please explain what algorithms are used by these "nonpartisan" commissions?


I’ll reply in good faith even though I detect sarcasm in your comment.

Generally nonpartisan commissions prioritise contiguity and compactness. There is an element of “I know it when I see it” because you’re trying to avoid both packing (packing minority voters from disparate areas into one) and cracking (distributing a minority district like Salt Like City into its 4 neighbouring districts, ensuring the city can’t vote for … whoever cities generally vote for).

So there is a human element involved, but these commissions generally do a reasonable job. You know how we know? States that move from nonpartisan to partisan commissions cause a dramatic change in the results of the next election. If the nonpartisan was biased like you imply with your air quotes, we wouldn’t observe that effect.

Also there are algorithms to draw fair districts without needing human judgement. See this paper[1] that expounds on one such algorithm.

1 - Swamy, R., King, D. M., & Jacobson, S. H. (2022). Multiobjective optimization for politically fair districting: A scalable multilevel approach. Operations Research, 71(2), 536–562. https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2311


Thank you, I really appreciate it. Found a nonpaywalled link:

https://optimization-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/7...

It is exciting to see research, but this algorithm has never been used by any commission anywhere (unless it's been adopted since publication! I would love to hear)

Can you find any algortithms actually used by these "nonpartisan" commissions you mention? Or even could you explain how nonpartisan participants are selected? (even if their commissions dont use any objective methodology)

I would truly love to see a way out of this mess, but I've been hoping for more than “I know it when I see it”


They're not.


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