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Now I'm feeling a bit less bad for not using Firefox anymore. Not using it because it's C++ is <insert terms that may not be welcome on HN>




So you think it's silly to not want to introduce new potentially remotely-exploitable CVEs in one of the most important pieces of software (the web browser) on one's computer? Or are you implying those 100k lines of multithreaded C++ code are bug-free and won't introduce any new CVEs?

[flagged]


> and don’t think that the programmer more than the languages contribute to those problems

This sounds a lot like how I used to think about unit testing and type checking when I was younger and more naive. It also echoes the sentiments of countless craftspeople talking about safety protocols and features before they lost a body part.

Safety features can’t protect you from a bad programmer. But they can go a long way to protect you from the inevitable fallibility of a good programmer.


I never said anything about unit testing nor type checking, last time I checked C/C++ are strongly typed but I guess I'm just too naïve to understand.

It's crazy how anti-Rust people think that eliminating 70% of your security bugs[1] by construction just by using a memory-safe language (not even necessarily Rust) is somehow a bad thing or not worth doing.

[1] - https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...


I'm not anti rust but I'm not drinking it's kool-aid either.

It's not about being completely bug free. Safe rust is going to be reasonably hardened against exploitable decoder bugs which can be converted into RCEs. A bug in safe rust is going to be a hell of a lot harder to turn into an exploit than a bug in bog standard C++.

> It’s crazy how people think using Rust will magically make your code bug and vulnerability free

It won't for all code, and not bug-free, but it absolutely does make it possible to write code parsing untrusted input all-but vulnerability free. It's not 100% foolproof but the track record of Rust parsing libraries is night-and-day better than C/C++ libraries in this domain. And they're often faster too.


Straw-man much?

Nope, not at all actually.

Multiple severe attacks on browsers over the years have targeted image decoders. Requiring an implementation in a memory safe language seems very reasonable to me, and makes me feel better about using FF.

It's not just "C++ bad". It's "we don't want to deal with memory errors in directly user facing code that parses untrusted contents".

That's a perfectly reasonable stance.




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