alt Hacker NewsI would say that Rust would be a better choice rarher than patching memory safety on top of C. But I think the reason for this is that most, if not all, cryptographic reference implementations are in C. So they want to use existing reference implementations without having to port them to Rust.
IMO cryptographers should start using Rust for their reference implementations, but I also get that they'd rather spend their time working on their next paper rather than learning a new language.
Replies
The original poster got pretty much all of Debian running in Fil-C, in a fairly brief amount of time.
Re-writing even a single significant library or package in Rust would take exponentially longer, so in this case Rust would not be "a better choice", but rather a non-starter.
Memory safety is a very small concern for most cryptographic implementations (e.g Side Channel attacks). Rust solves essentially none of the other concerns.
> IMO cryptographers should start using Rust for their reference implementations
IMO they should not, because if I look at a typical Rust code, I have no clue what is going on even with a basic understanding of Rust. C, however, is as simple as it gets and much closer to pseudocode.
I'm not a practioner of cryptography, but I would be wary about timing attacks that might become possible if such a dynamic runtime is introduced. At least relevant pieces of code would need to be re-evaluated in the Fil-C environment.
But maybe you could use C as the "glue language" and then the build better performing libraries in Rust for C to use. Like in Python!