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OpenVMM – A New VMM for Windows and Linux, Written in Rust

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171 points g0xA52A2A | 2 comments | 17 Oct 24 05:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.435s | source
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low_tech_love ◴[17 Oct 24 09:40 UTC] No.41867927[source]▶
I find it interesting that every single piece of software that was ever written in Rust always mentions that very proudly in its title. It's not something I see often with other programming languages (most software is just software and doesn't necessarily advertise the language it was built with). I do not know anything about Rust, so I'm just curious, does this confer a kind of underlying trustworthiness or quality to the application?
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sirwhinesalot ◴[17 Oct 24 09:52 UTC] No.41867995[source]▶
Due to Rust's safety guarantees there's a perception that software written in Rust is automatically safer than software written in its direct competitors C and C++.

This is not necessarily true, you can write unsafe Rust code and you can write safe C++ code, but it does seem to hold in practice that the guardrails imposed by Rust help quite a bit in stopping devs from making really stupid mistakes.

That would be the "thrustworthiness" implied by the use of Rust.

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1. kstrauser ◴[17 Oct 24 16:50 UTC] No.41871340[source]▶
For myself only, there's also an implication that perhaps the authors are a bit more concerned with safety and security in general. (Don't reply with counterexamples. I know them already. I mean that as a trend, not a solid rule.) That is, the sort of person who might pick Rust for its features might correlate with the sort of person who cares more about those properties in the first place. That doesn't mean they're experts who can execute the ideas flawlessly, or that someone slogging in C couldn't carefully built the same project. I do think it means they're more likely to prioritize safety (yes, it's not 100% safe; yes, you can write insecure code in Rust; don't "correct" me) as an inherent design goal than maybe someone cranking it out in assembler.
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2. hulitu ◴[17 Oct 24 18:50 UTC] No.41872593[source]▶
> For myself only, there's also an implication that perhaps the authors are a bit more concerned with safety and security in general. (Don't reply with counterexamples. I know them already. I mean that as a trend, not a solid rule.) That is, the sort of person who might pick Rust for its features might correlate with the sort of person who cares more about those properties in the first place

I haven't seen any causation between SW and their creator. A good example: Hans Reiser.