alt Hacker News> The baseline floor of quality will be higher for a Rust program vs. a C program given equal development effort.
Hmm, according to whom, exactly?
> Second, the total possible footprint of entire classes of bugs is zero thanks to design features of Rust (the borrowck, sum types, data race prevention), except in a specifically delineated areas which often total zero in the vast majority of Rust programs.
And yet somehow the internet went down because of a program written in rust that didn’t validate input.
Replies
> Hmm, according to whom, exactly?
Well, Google for one. https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...
> And yet somehow the internet went down because of a program written in rust that didn’t validate input.
You're ignoring other factors (it wasn't just Cloudflare's rust code that led to the issue), but even setting that aside your framing is not accurate. The rust program went down because the programmer made a choice that, given invalid input, it should crash. This could happen in every language ever made. It has nothing to do with rust.
> And yet somehow the internet went down because of a program written in rust that didn’t validate input.
What? The Cloudflare bug was from a broken system configuration that eventually cascaded into (among other things) a Rust program with hardcoded limits that crashed loudly. In no way did that Rust program bring down the internet; it was the canary, not the gas leak. Anybody trying to blame Rust for that event has no idea what they're talking about.
> And yet somehow the internet went down because of a program written in rust that didn’t validate input.
Tell me which magic language creates programs free of errors? It would have been better had it crashed and compromised memory integrity instead of an orderly panic due to an invariant the coder didn't anticipate? Type systems and memory safety are nice and highly valuable, but we all know as computer scientists we have yet to solve for logic errors.