Humans are bad at writing secure code, and GNOME developers are no exception. GNOME is primarily written using unsafe programming languages where simple mistakes in our code lead to devastating consequences for our users, and we make these mistakes all the time. No matter how much we try, GNOME developers will fail write secure code...
I don’t think anyone is arguing that C is as safe as Rust? Certainly my point is that Rust can still have bugs, and those bugs can be security critical.
There is no programming language that can’t have bugs, so such argument doesn’t state anything useful. It’s an empty truism.
OTOH the whataboutist/defeatist responses create a false equivalence. Even though both languages may have bugs: (P(bug | C) > 0) == (P(bug | Rust) > 0) stating it that way obscures the major difference in likelihood of the bugs: P(bug | C) >> P(bug | Rust).
Right but this all started with a discussion of whether or not using llm agents to find bugs is worthwhile or not. Clearly you can write obscure bugs in rust such that LLMs might be a cheap way to find them.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that C is as safe as Rust? Certainly my point is that Rust can still have bugs, and those bugs can be security critical.
score 1 · canonical
There is no programming language that can’t have bugs, so such argument doesn’t state anything useful. It’s an empty truism.
OTOH the whataboutist/defeatist responses create a false equivalence. Even though both languages may have bugs:
(P(bug | C) > 0) == (P(bug | Rust) > 0)stating it that way obscures the major difference in likelihood of the bugs:P(bug | C) >> P(bug | Rust).score 1 · canonical
Right but this all started with a discussion of whether or not using llm agents to find bugs is worthwhile or not. Clearly you can write obscure bugs in rust such that LLMs might be a cheap way to find them.
score 1 · canonical