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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14696 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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In the beginning, the C programming language was created, and there was much rejoicing. C is perhaps the single most influential language in the history of computing. It was "close to the hardware"*, it was fast*, it could do literally everything*. *Yes, I am simplifying a lot here.

But there were a few flaws. The programmer had to manage all the memory by himself, and that led to numerous security vulnerabilities in applications everywhere. Sometimes hackers exploited these vulnerabilities to the tune of several million dollars. This was bad.

But it's not like managing memory is particularly hard. It's just that with complex codebases, it's easy to miss a pointer dereference, or forget that you freed something, somewhere in potentially a million lines of code. So the greybeards said "lol git gud, just don't make mistakes."

The enlightened ones did not take this for an answer. They knew that the programmer shouldn't be burdened with micromanaging the details of memory, especially when security is at stake. Why is he allowed to call malloc without calling free?* The compiler should force him to do so. Better yet, the compiler can check the entire program for memory errors and refuse to compile, before a single unsafe line of code is ever run. *Actually memory leaks aren't usually security issues but I'm glossing over this because this post is already long.

They had discovered something profound: Absent external forces, the programmer will be lazy and choose the path of least resistance. And they created a language based on this principle. In C, you may get away with not checking the return value of a function that could error. In Rust, that is completely unacceptable and will make the compiler cry. The path of least resistance in C is to do nothing, while the path of least resistance in Rust is to handle the error.

That's what makes Rust a better programming language. And I have to agree with the zealots, they are right on this.

...So I have to be disappointed when they're not.

Rust seems to keep popping up in the news in the past couple of months. In November, a bug in Rust code deployed by Cloudflare took down their infrastructure, and half the Internet with it. (Why Cloudflare even has a monopoly on half the Internet is a controversial topic for another time.) The cause? A programmer didn't handle the error from a function.

Well that's technically not true, they did. It's just that calling .unwrap(), a function which will immediately abort the application on error, counts as "handling" the error. In other words, the path of least resistance is not to actually handle the error, but to crash. I argue that this isn't a better outcome than what would have happened in C, which would also be to crash. Sure, the crash won't be a segfault in Rust, but that doesn't matter if half the Internet dies.

This month, a CVE was filed in the Rust part of the Linux kernel, and it turned out to be a memory corruption vulnerability, ironically enough. "But how could this happen?" Rust has these things called unsafe blocks that let you do unsafe memory operations, closer to what you would be allowed to do in C (though granted, I have heard convincing arguments that unsafe Rust is still generally safer than C). So the path of least resistance is not to do things the safest way, but to just surround everything in unsafe if you get tired of fighting the borrow checker.

I hear the same pitch all the time from Rust advocates. "C is unsafe, programmers are too fallible, we must use a language that forces good code." They consistently blame the language, and don't blame the programmer. So how did they react to the above incidents? Did they blame the programmer, or the language?

"Oh, you just shouldn't use unwrap like that." "Duh, don't use unsafe, it's obviously unsafe." Sound familiar? They're blaming the programmer. Even Null of Kiwi Farms had this take on his podcast.

If I was one of them, I would throw my hands up and admit that the language didn't have guardrails to prevent this, so if I would blame C in a universe where the incidents happened in equivalent C code, then I should blame Rust here. But then, I wouldn't be a Rust zealot. I'd just be a Rust kinda-supporter. I'd have to carefully consider the nuances of the language and take into account various factors before forming an opinion. Oh no, the horror! And if I went the other way and blamed the programmer, it wouldn't be long before I'd have this nagging feeling that I'm just like a C-nile greybeard, telling the programmers to git gud, and at that point, there seems to be less of a point to using Rust if we just assume that programmers are infallible.

It's a Catch-22, in other words.

To be clear, I'm not saying that these incidents alone mean Rust is a bad choice for anything, ever. I'm not saying Cloudflare or Linux shouldn't use Rust. I'm not telling people what they should or shouldn't use. I'm just pointing out the double standards. Rust people can attack C all day using one set of (IMO, entirely justified) standards, but when they are confronted with these incidents, they suddenly switch to another set of standards. Or to put it more clearly, they have a motte and bailey. Motte: "Rust can't prevent shitty programmers from writing shitty code." Bailey: "C is unsafe, because of all the memory unsafe code people have written, and we should rewrite everything in Rust to fix all of it!"

I argue that this isn't a better outcome than what would have happened in C, which would also be to crash.

This is both normatively and positively wrong.

Positively: in C, Undefined Behavior often leads to a crash, but is not actually required by the C standard to lead to a crash. The outcome is literally undefined.

Normatively: If you write code that leads to Undefined Behavior, the C compiler is allowed to and often will emit code that will crash; this is the same outcome as the Rust case, but is still a worse situation because grep unwrap is a thing and grep some_regex_catching_all_C_UB is (despite linter developers trying their best) only a dream. The C compiler is allowed to emit code that will make demons fly out of your nose. The C compiler is allowed to, and often will, emit code that will hand control of your computer to the botnet of whichever attacker first discovered how to trigger the UB, at which point if you're lucky your computer is now laundering your electric bill into some mafioso's bitcoin wallet at pennies on the dollar, and if you're unlucky your computer is now an accessory to DDOS attacks or blackmail or financial scams. These are much worse outcomes. Even CloudFlare crashing is much better than CloudFlare being compromised would have been.

Bailey: "C is unsafe, because of all the memory unsafe code people have written, and we should rewrite everything in Rust to fix all of it!"

The second clause here is false IMHO (though bias makes MO very H: I've been writing a little C and a lot of C++ for 3 decades and have no current plans to stop), but the first clause is simply theoretically and empirically true and belongs in the motte.

I do wish the second clause was true, for some language if not necessarily Rust, because I have about a hundred other gripes with C/C++ that can probably only be fixed by someone starting from scratch ... but whenever I investigate a new language that I'm excited to see fixes flaw X, they seem to do it at the same time as they omit all possible support for features Y and Z and end up with something worse (for some of my purposes; there are three other languages I write in for different use cases) overall.

Yeah, my ideal modern language would be a curated version of C++. It'd have a modern package manager, cut out a ton of the language features that are outdated or dangerous or both, and rewrite some existing features (e.g. lambda functions) to be less clunky now that backwards compatibility isn't a problem.

But making something like this wouldn't be very sexy.

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