GAgamozolabs·Apr 12, 2019
Memory related bugs are quite common (I see many daily as a security researcher).
I have previous hypervisors and kernels I've written (in assembly, C, and Rust) [https://github.com/gamozolabs/falkervisor_beta and https://github.com/gamozolabs/falkervisor_grilled_cheese].
Memory corruption was my most common issue in these kernels, and when working with fuzzing and security research, my confidence in my own tooling got in the way of root causing bugs. I would find that sometimes bugs that I "detected" in the code I was fuzzing, was indeed due to corruption in my own code. This pushed me a bit towards finding a safer language to write my kernel in, not for security, but for code quality.
I was a pretty hardcore C fan and I never saw myself getting into a higher level language like Rust. However the cleanliness of the output code got me imm
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ediately hooked a few years ago. I do a lot of work on low-level development and optimizations, and having a compiler with predictable properties of emit code is really important to me (such that I can have a decent idea in my head what the emit code will be). Having allocators be scope based rather than garbage collected really helps with this, and helps with the usability of the language for kernel development.
Also you mentioned races as something Rust does not prevent, but it does prevent traditional "exploitable" race conditions, by enforcing that all types shared (passed via message passing, or via globals) must be "Sync", which means they must be proven safe to share between threads. Using atomics or wrapping things in Mutexes is one way to make things sharable. However, Rust does not prevent deadlocks, which are fairly common as just "bugs", especially in kernel development.
That being said, Rust has many things that I do not like, such as the clumsiness around working with generic arrays of >32 elements, and working with raw "plain old data". There's definitely a lot of research in modern Rust going into web assembly and other features that I have zero interest in personally, while some of the systems aspects can be a bit lacking. But, I am not personally contributing time to the Rust project, so I cannot complain too much. That being said, it is full featured enough to write bootloaders and kernels in, and I use it for all of my projects for the past few years.
TL;DR: Rust is fast, prevents many of the most common bugs (and many of the hardest to reproduce/fix bugs such as corruption/UaFs/etc), and has predictable codegen which is useful for optimization and systems development.