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bitwize 3 hours ago

"'Nothing could have prevented this from happening,' say users of only language where this happens" comes to bite OpenBSD.

amiga386 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

OpenBSD wouldn't say anything like that. They're well aware of the 40+ year old codebase's limitations, but accept it because they're not so stupid as to "rewrite it in <other language>" which will bring a million bugs.

They've innovated again and again in the security space and aggressively bring in new security features like pf, OpenSSH, W^X enforcement, pledge(), arc4random(), ASLR, so many other things.

Unlike, say, NPM, which can't even replicate existing packaging systems like yum or apt, and has been plagued with security flaws despite being built entirely out of a memory-safe language. Quite an achievement.

efficax 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's difficult to say if a kernel written in rust would not have similar vulnerabilites, because it would be impossible to build a kernel without significant amounts of `unsafe`.

anoneng 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Tell us you know nothing about kernel programming and trust stacks while you are at it.

convolvatron 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I know a lot about kernel programming. and the last thing as I would ever suggest as being core to kernel programming is that is a specialized discipline that uses different rules and shouldn't be accessible to neophytes. its just code. sometimes the restrictions are unfamiliar, but there is nothing magic going on here.

applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The OpenBSD project was started in 1995, with ancestry going back further than that. Should they have first invented Rust? Or at what point do you suppose the decades-old codebase should have been completely rewritten?

JCattheATM 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not too late to start now, similar to how Linux did a few years back.

tosti 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Rumours of Linux being rewritten in Rust are greatly exaggerated.

JCattheATM 6 minutes ago | parent [-]

No one is claiming that, they are at least setting a foundation for that to be possible though.