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davedx | on: Broccoli2Shell: Brotli decoder RCE in Node.js, Python and more
Honestly it's time to get rid of C as a language used where security is a factor. Enough already. Why the hell is a lib like brotli that processes public general internet traffic, and maintained by google, not in rust?
thephyber | parent | next
Security is a factor everywhere. And C is everywhere. There's not going to be a "rewrite everything in Rust" project until after there is some legit penalty for selling / offering software in C that could be more secure in another language.

I think Mozilla got it right when they abandoned the effort to rewrite the entire browser in Rust and instead focused on analysis of which modules needed priority rewrites. If a module has historically had zero memory-related bugs, then there are other higher priority things to spend time on.

That said, Google Project Zero should have had Brotli on their radar. Hopefully they still have people and resources.

gsnedders | root | parent | next
I’ll point out that Servo was always a research project — any thought of it replacing Gecko was an incredibly long-term stretch goal. It was _a lot_ more interested in “can we write a high-performance browser engine in Rust” (there’s a reason why it significantly predates Rust 1.0 — they were very much developed together!) and “can we implement parallelism in places where browsers historically have not” (because you have more guarantees of safety).

Chromium _has_ been replacing certain components with ones in safe languages, and it seems like that will continue slowly (with integrating them into the existing codebase, with web compatibility risk of any changes in behaviour, with the risk of performance and power regressions).

anthk | root | parent
Asterinax. RustPyhon. PHP 8.5 rewrite in Rust. FFMPEG and Qemu might follow soon. It's inevitable.
uecker | parent | next
Sorry, I find the supply chain risks of Rust much more worrying than these memory safety issues. So how about we get rid of Rust? At least cargo is a problem.
_flux | parent | next
I can understand why people used a C library for these apps, as when HTTP2 was specified, the C lib was the only game in down.

However, why not switch to the Rust lib when it was available? I suppose people at Dropbox are now pretty happy they did in 2016: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/lossless-compression-wit...

It's slower, though. Too high a price to pay for safety it seems.

doublerabbit | parent | next
Because these applications were created long before Rust existed.

There is a cost to conversion.

_flux | root | parent | next
Rust-Brotli (by Dropbox) is actually a drop-in replacement for the Brotli C lib: https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli#:~:text=rust-brotli%2...

Dropbox switched to it a decade ago, so it's probably quite product-ready.

Gigachad | root | parent | next
Brotil was actually created post rust, but before rust took off.
anthk | root | parent | next
Check Librsvg, or php-rust. Or tons of gtk4-rs software doing it just fine.
davedx | root | parent
It's not even an application it's a compression library
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