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posted by janrinok on Friday September 23 2022, @11:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the leaks-are-for-kids dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Mark Russinovich, the chief technology office (CTO) of Microsoft Azure, says developers should avoid using C or C++ programming languages in new projects and instead use Rust because of security and reliability concerns.

Rust, which hit version 1.0 in 2020 and was born at Mozilla, is now being used within the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), at Meta, at Amazon Web Services, at Microsoft for parts of Windows and Azure, in the Linux kernel, and in many other places. 

Engineers value its "memory safety guarantees", which reduce the need to manually manage a program's memory and, in turn, cut the risk of memory-related security flaws burdening big projects written in "memory unsafe" C or C++, which includes Chrome, Android, the Linux kernel, and Windows. 

Microsoft drove home this point in 2019 after revealing 70% of its patches in the past 12 years were fixes for memory safety bugs due largely to Windows being written mostly in C and C++. Google's Chrome team weighed in with its own findings in 2020, revealing that 70% of all serious security bugs in the Chrome codebase were memory management and safety bugs. It's written mostly in C++.     

"Unless something odd happens, it [Rust] will make it into 6.1," wrote Torvalds, seemingly ending a long-running debate over Rust becoming a second language to C for the Linux kernel. 

The Azure CTO's only qualifier about using Rust is that it was preferable over C and C+ for new projects that require a non-garbage-collected (GC) language. GC engines handle memory management. Google's Go is a garbage-collection language, while the Rust project promotes that Rust is not. AWS engineers like Rust over Go because of the efficiencies it offers without GC.

"Speaking of languages, it's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++ and use Rust for those scenarios where a non-GC language is required. For the sake of security and reliability. the industry should declare those languages as deprecated," Russinovich wrote. 

Rust is a promising replacement for C and C++, particularly for systems-level programming, infrastructure projects, embedded software development, and more – but not everywhere and not in all projects.  

[...] Rust shouldn't be viewed as a silver bullet for all the bad habits developers practice when coding in C or C++. 

Bob Rudis, a cybersecurity researcher for GreyNoise Intelligence, who was formerly with Rapid7, noted developers can carry across the same bad security habits to Rust.

"As others have said, you can write "safely" in C or C++, but it's much harder, no matter what dialect you use than it is in Rust. Mind you, you can still foul up security in Rust, but it does avoid a lot of old memory problems."


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  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday September 25 2022, @05:44PM (5 children)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 25 2022, @05:44PM (#1273580) Journal

    Really? I can think of a completely trivial solution that ticks the box. It might not be optimal... But I think a certain Farbice Bellard of mega-super-intelligence and qemu fame might already have invented it and perfected it many years ago.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 25 2022, @06:21PM (4 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday September 25 2022, @06:21PM (#1273588)

    Could be, I disengaged from the theory long ago...

    Now, when you say "imaginary CPU" that's where you become PhD eligible, since you can always imagine a CPU that hasn't existed before, and therefore your PhD will be original :-P

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    • (Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday September 25 2022, @06:41PM (3 children)

      by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 25 2022, @06:41PM (#1273598) Journal

      It was an ungodly mix of SPARC and ARM, FYI.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 27 2022, @01:58AM (2 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday September 27 2022, @01:58AM (#1273801)

        For my Masters' Thesis in 1989 I essentially built the processor from the PS3: Common Motorola CPU for a central controller with an array of 8 DSPs for the "heavy lifting."

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        • (Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday September 27 2022, @11:49AM (1 child)

          by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 27 2022, @11:49AM (#1273861) Journal
          • (Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 27 2022, @02:37PM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday September 27 2022, @02:37PM (#1273873)

            When they announced the architecture, some 15+ years later, I was like: "Well, it was obvious to me, what took everyone else so long?!!"

            Side note: although I bought the parts and started breadboarding the actual thing, people from my advisor to other professors and other MS/PhD candidates kept saying "you know, you don't have to actually build one to get your degree...." I eventually listened to them after about a semester and a half.

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