Martin Uecker / is on Nostr

Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering
Graz University of Technology

Institute of Biomedical Imaging, TU Graz: https://ibi.tugraz.at/
Lab in Göttingen: https://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~muecker1/

Last Notes

2024-07-20 09:41:58

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My point is that memory safety does not help here. Because a panic at a out-of-bounds is memory safe and would still have the exact same effect. Hector's argument seems to be that other things you can optionally do in Rust would potentially allow to avoid this, but this is not the result of using a memory safe language per se. I agree about the sad state of software engineering and I also I agree about the advantages of memory safety in general.

2024-07-20 06:11:53

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The argument that a memory safe language would have prevented the problem is incorrect, because terminating the program (kernel) on invalid operation *is* something that could also happen in a memory safe language and seems even the default in Rust for many things. Whether you could have done it differently (certainly!) and whether Rust makes this easier or not is a different discussion.

2024-07-20 05:47:09

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You can not do what? Forcing people to use at instead of [] in C++? Would certainly be possible. But the discussion what "you could do" misses the point completely. What would happen in reality in a poor code base written on limited budget? Most likely would simply panic, or?

2024-07-19 20:09:35

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Then I do not see an inherent advantage of using Rust here. Maybe the careful Rust programmer could have added the code to do something else than crash. The people implementing the page fault handling could have done the same. The guy writing the parser (?) could have made sure to handle all cases correctly, etc. But there many design trade offs... Fundamentally, there are higher level engineering decisions which went wrong here IMHO.

2024-07-19 19:34:50

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Not sure what the point is. We seem to be right back to "the programmer has to do a good job".

2024-07-19 18:01:49

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BUG would bring the system down. So how is the result different?

2024-07-19 17:00:47

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Wouldn't you get a panic by default for an out-of-bounds access in Rust? How would the end result be different? Also see Ariane 5 for an example how memory safety can fail rather spectacularly.