Talk at Prof Laboon's Testing Class

outline.md

• What is Rust?

  • New systems programming language, aiming to replace C & C++
  • Fast, safe, and concurrent

• Bad Things the Rust compiler won't let you do

  • Only one owner, one mutable borrow, one immutable borrow
    • prevents data races
    • prevents use after free
    • prevents double free
  • Uninitialized variables
  • No nullable pointers
  • Not handle a case in a match
  • No undefined behavior
    • Array bounds checks at runtime defined to panic

• Bad Things you still can do in Rust

  • unsafe
  • doesn't prevent memory leaks (consider you can have a circular Rc)
    • http://huonw.github.io/blog/2016/04/memory-leaks-are-memory-safe/
  • Deadlock
  • Have a non-data race condition
  • Fail to call destructors
  • Overflow integers
  • Abort the program
  • Delete the production database

• Case studies

  • Heartbleed
    • Buffer Overread - http://xkcd.com/1354/
    • https://play.rust-lang.org/?gist=11689d006bc9dd0487de437106ea6a39&version=stable&backtrace=0
    • Switching to a safer language is one thing, but not the only thing, that would prevent bugs like heartbleed! http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/heartbleed.html

http://deliberate-software.com/safety-rank-part-2/ https://tonyarcieri.com/would-rust-have-prevented-heartbleed-another-look http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/heartbleed-in-rust https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/meet-safe-and-unsafe.html https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html