• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle



  • I have observed people taking Rust seriously. You need to reexamine your assumptions.

    We have an evolved capability to short-circuit decisions with a rapid emotional evaluation. It means as a species we didn’t die out early [“that’s a lion; I’m a oerson; lions eat people ergo… Agh!” is not a sustainable strategy] - what’s amazing is that we can also apply it to elarned abstract things like an aestetic sense about programming languages. Such instincts aren’t always perfect, but they’re still worth paying attention to. I don’t see a reason not to express that in a blog post, but you can replace it with “this is unergonomic and in some cases imprecise” if you prefer.





  • That’s a cracking article.

    My own use of jvm errors tends to follow the same kinds of patterns: I think the major fault with that model is having RuntimeException as a subclass of Exception, because it’s really intended for abandonment-style errors. (The problem is that lots of people use it instead as an exception system in order to cut down on boilerplate.)

    I find it eye-opening that the author prefers callsite annotation with try (although I’m not going to argue with their experience at the time). I can see this being either “no big deal” or even “a good thing” to Rust users in particular - mutability and borrowing annotations at both callsite and definition aren’t required to make the language work afaict (your ide will instantly carp if you miss 'em out) but the increased programmer visibility is typically seen as a good thing. (Perhaps this is down to people largely reviewing PRs in a browser, I dunno.) Certainly there’s tons of good food for thought there.


  • I’m not sure why it’s “obviously” good to move from one mechanism to two: as a user I now have to categorise every path to work out which is appropriate.

    What I said was less about adding to a function signature than it was about adding to a facade - that is, a system boundary, although the implementation may be the same depending on language. People typically use exceptions pretty badly - a function signature with a baggage-train of internal exceptions that might be thrown by implementation guts is another antipattern that gives the approach a bad rep. Errors have types too (or they should have), and the typical exception constructor has a wrapper capability for good reason.






  • I’d be cautious about the “kill -9” reasoning. It isn’t necessarily equivalent to yanking power.

    Contents of application memory lost, yes. Contents of unflushed OS buffers, no. Your db will be fsyncing (or moral equivalent thereof) if it’s worth the name.

    This is an aside; backing up from a volume snapshot is half a reasonable idea. (The other half is ensuring that you can restore from the backup, regularly, automatically, and the third half is ensuring that your automated validation can be relied on.)





  • Check Crowdstrike’s blurb about the 1-10-60 rule.

    You can bet that they have a KPI that says they can deliver a patch in under 15m; that can preclude testing.

    Although that would have caught it, what happened here is that 40k of nuls got signed and delivered as config. Which means that unparseable config on the path from CnC to ring0 could cause a crash and was never covered by a test.

    It’s a hell of a miss, even if you’re prepared to accept the argument about testing on the critical path.

    (There is an argument that in some cases you want security aystems to fail closed; however that’s an extreme case - PoS systems don’t fall into that - and you want to opt into that explicitly, not due to a test omission.)