Memory safety is certainly a topic worth talking about, but on HN it always ends with the same conclusion: use rust. Is that really the only solution?
I've never seen anything quite like the rust community. They're hell-bent on recruitment. More so than any other language platform I've seen. Personally, I'm just sick of it. It's fine if you don't feel the same way. I was just voicing my frustrations.
> Memory safety is certainly a topic worth talking about, but on HN it always ends with the same conclusion: use rust. Is that really the only solution?
No. Of course not. It appears to be the most common solution and community matters, so I suspect it will end up being a dominant solution. But you can (mostly) solve this problem with completely orthogonal approaches. Getting all of your code to run on x86 with MTE enabled is another approach that prevents entire classes of problems.
I'm not a member of the Rust community. My actual work focuses more on the Log4j-style stuff than buffer overruns. But I really don't know what people who are upset about the state of memory safety can do to prevent the "ugh, here come the rust nerds" complaints other than simply never raising the problem - which obviously isn't the right approach.
10 years ago the C and C++ community complained about a different thing whenever memory safety came up. "UGH, stop talking about GCed languages. GC advocates are such aggressive recruiters." Now the complaints have just reoriented themselves.
No it isn't the only option, plenty of languages are available, specially if automatic memory management is an option on the specific deployment scenario.
Usually we land on Rust only discussions, due to more active advocacy that should known better to avoid tiring the audience, or by defensive attittude from unsafe language folks that push back every single reference to write secure software as a sales pitch for Rust.
I always mention secure system programming languages going back to 1958. Don't remember Rust being that ancient, and have plenty of critical remarks about Rust as well.
Seriously! Kinda like those food services people who harp on and on about gloves. Clean gloves prevent this, clean gloves solve that. And they're not content to just use gloves themselves. They keep evangelizing to recruit everyone to their practice.
It gets annoying to those of us who know how to do safe food prep without wearing gloves.
I've never seen anything quite like the rust community. They're hell-bent on recruitment. More so than any other language platform I've seen. Personally, I'm just sick of it. It's fine if you don't feel the same way. I was just voicing my frustrations.