this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Programming
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I'm going to advocate for C here: the sheer simplicity, fast compile times, and power it gives you means it's not a bad language, even after all these years. Couple that with the fact that everything supports it.
Rust, while I don't actually know how to write it, seems much more difficult to learn, slower to compile, and if you want to do anything with memory, you have to fight the compiler.
And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.
In cases where bugs have been counted they tended to make up the majority of vulnerabilities. Chrome, Firefox, and Windows reported that around 70% of security vulnerabilites were memory corruption. Yes a subset, but the majority of the worst subset.
I've also heard that unsafe Rust is even more dangerous than C. I guess that's probably something to do with the fact that you're always on your toes in C vs Rust? I don't know. But if you need to do any sort of manual memory management you're going to need unsafe Rust.
No, rust is stricter because you need to think a lot more about whether weird edge cases in your unsafe code can potentially cause UB. For ex. If your data structure relies on the
Ordinterface (which gives you comparison operators and total ordering), and someone implements Ord wrong, you aren't allowed to commit UB still. In C++ land I'd venture to guess most any developer won't care - that's a bug with your code and not the data structure.It's also more strict because rusts referencing rules are a lot harder then C's, since they're all effectively
restrictby default, and just turning a pointer into a reference for a little bit to call a function means that you have to abide by those restrictions now without the help of the compiler.