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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15908 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!"

Rust is an interesting programming language, because it perfected the nanny-state compiler. Rust is infamously difficult to get to compile if you don’t know what you’re doing. You can spam .unwrap() and unsafe and write unsafe code, but it requires you to at least actively choose to accept these flaws as opposed to passively letting them by accidentally.

If AI is going to write code, I think Rust is actually going to point the way toward the future. AI can make writing code very easy but introduces all sorts of potential zero-day bugs and faults. Rust actually solves much of this because many bugs the AI could write in other languages are not even valid Rust. The future of programming languages belongs to whoever develops an even more restrictive and advanced compiler that eliminates whole categories of AI errors from running. (A superset of python or typescript would be very appealing here.)

superset of python

You mean the language that is de facto completely untyped in the real world and does next to no checks on the code before trying to execute it?

Python is going through a devx revolution right now. Pydantic, Astral and Mojo are the main contributors.

Mojo is typed, compiled and a (claimed) super set of Python. It hasn't seen as much adoption, but has is led by systems Jesus - Chris Lattner. I'm hopeful it will get there eventually.

Astral on the other hand, has transformed the python dev workflow. 'uv' solved python packaging. 'ruff' solved linting and formatting and now 'ty' solves python type-checking. Separately, Pydantic allows data objects to be strictly typed and is pretty much a python built in.

And I know it's customary to throw a bunch of half-baked tools at someone to silence criticism about a language. For years, that was true for python. But no, these tools have genuinely become ubiquitous. The python code-base at my current job is pretty much strictly typed.

In a few years, I'm betting python will become a pleasant language to use.

Pydantic is regularly used, but what about Astra? Are you using astral yourself? Is it in any major open-source projects?

I’ve never seen anyone do package management that wasn’t pip (or conda/apt depending on environment).

Open to it, I’ve just never seen it in the wild.

Uv has only been available for a year or two, but it is being adopted extremely quickly (because pip was just that bad): https://wagtail.org/blog/uv-overtakes-pip-in-ci/

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