Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-were-creating-a-new-rust-based-programming-language-for-secure-coding/

by TanakaTarou • 7 years ago

274 182 7 years ago

sansnomme• 7 years ago

Oh no, I bet it's gonna be a C# flavored Rust. None of Rust's terse syntax and functional influence. It's going to be full-blown Java-style OOP with plenty of Wnd handles to be thrown around. Yikes, I certainly hope I am not right.

52-6F-62• 7 years ago

Rust#

mcraiha• 7 years ago

I would gladly accept C# styled system language which has same safety and borrowing features as Rust.

goto11• 7 years ago

Why not a F# flavored Rust?

plenty of Wnd handles to be thrown around

That is not really a language issue, is it?

edgyquant• 7 years ago

this is what I'm hoping for. Introducing memory safety is enough I dislike Rust because of how different it decided it needed to be compared to most other systems languages.

dlbucci• 7 years ago

What does "Rust-based" even mean? Inspired by Rust? Does it transpile to Rust or something? Very confusing phrasing to me...

jandrese• 7 years ago

Historically it means they would start with Rust and then add in just enough Windows proprietary stuff to make it not run on any other platform.

cududa• 7 years ago

Given their past years of behavior and focus on dev tools, what in the world makes you think that would be the case? They ported their chromium browser to every platform from day 1.

shmerl• 7 years ago

Given MS history, EEE was the first thing I thought about too. Take something, extend, then claim it's superior and everyone should stop using the original.

But if it simply means they are making a new language using lessons from Rust - then why not.

Though I didn't quite get what problem they found with using the idea of scope based lifetimes per object, that they needed to redefine it in context of groups.

pmontra• 7 years ago

It's probably what they did with C#, starting from Java. I don't think there will be any compatibility, only high level similarity.

patagurbon• 7 years ago

Alternatively it could be what Microsoft Research does a lot which is take some subset of a language and add capabilities, like software verification with F*.

david-cako• 7 years ago

On the road to R# I guess.

I guess shipping Windows API cargo crates makes too much sense. Does anyone have any context for gaps in Rust they are addressing?

In TFA it mentions that ownership will be based on groups of objects, but I’m not sure I understand what this solves that a struct doesn’t.

tal8d• 7 years ago

I guess shipping Windows API cargo crates makes too much sense. Does anyone have any context for gaps in Rust they are addressing?

I haven't finished digging through the OP, but it looks like a bunch of Microsoft employees (already aware of Rust's safety benefits) have started recognizing the commitment to FFI as well. My last project had a feature that depended on a bind to win32, which turned out to be the most time consuming aspect - as it demanded a bunch of tooling that was otherwise unnecessary (valgrind, etc). If they were to take stewardship of that interface, lots of unsafe{} would disappear overnight.

https://kennykerr.ca/2019/11/05/rust/

steveklabnik3• 7 years ago

It’s described as a completely new thing, that borrows some ideas from Rust.

yarrel• 7 years ago

RScript.

Someone1234• 7 years ago

This slideshow is pretty interesting (in particular slide 14):

https://www.slideshare.net/KTNUK/digital-security-by-design-...

Talks about sandboxing C/C++ libraries that interact with Rust. Kinda make a safe unsafe sandbox Rust interface ("less unsafe?") if I understand it correctly (I likely don't).

The actual linked article is all over the place, I cannot make heads or tails of it and seems to be conflating multiple security issues/mitigations together into a mish mash.

alimbada• 7 years ago

The actual linked article is all over the place, I cannot make heads or tails of it and seems to be conflating multiple security issues/mitigations together into a mish mash.

Typical ZDNet.

pjmlp16• 7 years ago

You really need to watch the video.

Basically a new language for system software and containers that allow to tame existing software, due to the expenses of rewriting everything into safe languages.

It is based on the CHERI tagged architecture.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/

Just starting now, they have done the ground work, will open source it and are looking for collaborators.

saagarjha5• 7 years ago

Video where this was introduced, which has more details: https://vimeo.com/376180843

Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/KTNUK/digital-security-by-design-...

zozbot2342• 7 years ago

The slides don't really add much detail. They're just a light introduction to the sort of region-based memory management that was already being used by Cyclone, well before the Rust project was even a thing.

pjmlp16• 7 years ago

The video explains more:

- Need to keep old insecure code around, too much money to rewrite the world from scratch in Rust, C#, or whatever safe language makes your day

- They are just starting the project, so far only interpreter and runtime model

- It is based on CHERI CPU research (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/), which has memory tagging

- They are planning to open source the existing work in a couple of months

- Looking for collaboration

bluejekyll2• 7 years ago

already being used by Cyclone, well before the Rust project was even a thing.

Let’s be a little more accurate here. Rust is an actively developed language, Cyclone was a research project that I don’t believe has received an update since 2006.

Rust also is explicit that it borrowed its lifetime concept from Cyclone. Rust is in use and gaining popularity in a way that Cyclone didn’t.

This is a bit like the debate between Apple and Xerox in terms of the beginnings of the desktop/mouse/GUI environment. Apple was the first to make it popular, xerox park invented it. Rust has a similar relationship with Cyclone.

ksec• 7 years ago

I always knew Rust was picking up from Cyclone, but I was, stupid enough to assume Cyclone was half baked, half finish programming languages with the Ownership idea.

It wasn't until today I did a search on it, and it reached 1.0!

Why wasn't Cyclone being used or continue to be developed?

peonicles• 7 years ago

Sylvan Clebsch and Sophia Drossopoulou (credited on Project Verona in a slide) work on the Pony, which has been described as a cross between Rust and Erlang.

DrBazza• 7 years ago

Midori v2?

http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/10/objects-as-secure-capabil...

Horusiath• 7 years ago

Midori was conceptually closer to what Pony lang offers.

bloaf• 7 years ago

You mean Sing#?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_sharp

_bxg14• 7 years ago

Argh, they couldn't just contribute to the existing project.

kasperni• 7 years ago

Argh, you couldn't just take the time to read the actual article.

"The ownership model in Verona is based on groups of objects, not like in Rust where it's based on a single object.

_bxg14• 7 years ago

I did read that. So it's not a straight clone, but still, Rust has enough of an uphill battle as it is to reach wide adoption, without having its target market fragmented. So I would've been excited to see Microsoft embracing it instead of building a competitor. Not that I can necessarily judge them for that, but it's still disappointing.

steveklabnik3• 7 years ago

Microsoft already contributes to the Rust project; for example, Azure sponsors our CI.

techntoke4• 7 years ago

Lol, they host our data so therefore they contribute. That is some next level Stockholm Syndrome.

pjmlp16• 7 years ago

For the hating Microsoft crowd, here are the projects where they are also using Rust,

https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/?s=rust

And the talks done about the internal adoption,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCB19DRw_60

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o01QmYVluSw

And the author from C++/WinRT is now working on Rust/WinRT.

https://kennykerr.ca/2019/11/05/rust/

So lets wait a bit before going to the castle with the pitchforks and torches.

JNRowe• 7 years ago

As a big proponent of F# it annoys me how much one still needs to fight "but M$" arguments if I point out a thing that F# does well. The same thing seems to happen when discussing Haskell with people who know just enough to recognise the influence MSR employees have on it.

It almost makes me wonder how they/we can work around that sentiment now. Either hope for generational shift to eventually kill it, or perhaps have them make a point of landing projects outside of MS and hoping nobody notices(GitHub R++ or whatever).

Tips on how others approach these discussions with Microsoft haters greatly appreciated!

orev• 7 years ago

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”

I try to be objective as much as possible, but having witnessed almost all of Microsoft’s behavior through history, we have been fooled 100s if not 1000s of times. How many times do you let the fox back into the hen house?

The only thing I think when I read recent “Microsoft is so great” comments is that the person is either too young to have any real knowledge, or they have simply not been paying attention for the past few decades.

For anyone who has seen what they have done through all of history, it will take decades to believe they have truly changed.

brobinson3• 7 years ago

My only beef right now with Microsoft is their insistence on having creepy telemetry in everything. As someone _very_ interested in F#, I encountered this recently with both Visual Studio Code and .NET Core.

https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/3093

nickpsecurity• 7 years ago

Microsoft is actively collecting billions of dollars by patent suing (or threatening to) Android providers despite contributing nothing to Android. That's what kind of company they are. They also make some great stuff, esp MS Research. I'm hesitant to use anything made by a company that patent trolls other companies, though. I don't feel safe in long term.

xvilka6• 7 years ago

Why F# was needed in the first place? OCaml[1] is vastly superior, and doesn't require .NET since can be compiled into the native code. Just in the need of the better Windows platform support. And they add more features with time than F# devs.

esotericn• 7 years ago

It almost makes me wonder how they/we can work around that sentiment now.

From my perspective, the issue ultimately is - why? What do I gain from using Microsoft software?

I worked at a Microsoft shop for a short period. All of the 'new MS' stuff I've personally worked with has certainly been Windows first.

Take C#. It might work on Linux, sure, but you have stuff like the .NET runtime taking forever to start, the reliance on Visual Studio, .NET Framework isn't open source because.... why?

Or perhaps you have Microsoft Teams - for which, despite it effectively being a web app - there is no Linux client and in Firefox half the features are disabled. Even on Windows it's literally a shit version of Slack which presumably exists solely because it's bundled with other Microsoft stuff or because the name has appeal to some PHBs.

For the most part from what I can tell it's all still either Windows first, or a crap version of something else, or both. There might be some minor researchy fun bits, but anything that seems to actually see wide use is all Windows stack.

What's the point? I read the article, and it pretty much feels like they want to Windowsify Rust. Why should I care about that?

Literally everything I read about Microsoft seems to be from people who want an excuse to use Windows, or something. I want Windows to burn and die in a fire; so what is there for me?

hybrids• 7 years ago

Found the article to be somewhat vague and found this slideshare presentation which was...a little less vauge.

https://www.slideshare.net/KTNUK/digital-security-by-design-...

It seems like they want to do something like Rust, but with a new focus on regionalized memory management.

hordeallergy• 7 years ago

How long before redox will run on my surface?

Animats• 7 years ago

I'm curious to see what Microsoft does.

The big breakthrough with Rust was ownership, and Microsoft seems to agree on that. Rust has a lot of other baggage that could be dispensed with. Of course, Microsoft has their own baggage.

unlinked_dll• 7 years ago

I disagree about ownership being the big break through, I’d argue it’s the concept of multiple aliasing and handling that at the syntactic level through the borrow checker that leads to all the safety guarantees of Rust.

hu35• 7 years ago

More precisely Cyclone already had borrow checker over a decade ago. Rust derives much of its memory model from that language.

danielscrubs2• 7 years ago

Which is awesome. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.

classified• 7 years ago

There should be no doubt about the agenda: Embrace, extend and extinguish.

ncmncm• 7 years ago

That doesn't apply here, unlike with WSL.

Microsoft has a huge problem: thousands of coders who aren't disciplined enough to write reliable code. They need a language to provide the needed discipline. They tried making their own language, and now understand that they are not good enough at that, either. Rust, or a fork of Rust, might suffice.

They are not interested in displacing Rust from wherever it is being used. They just need something for their things, that their customers can also use. Lock-in is exercised farther up the chain.

gigatexal• 7 years ago

What a huge validation of Rust. Here’s to hoping this improves Windows.

techntoke4• 7 years ago

Lol, if they wanted to make it better they'd adopt some practices and tools from Linux to get common-sense developers interested instead of looking for MS drones that don't know why they do what they do.

mkl• 7 years ago

They did: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about

Linux tools run on Windows 10 just fine. WSL 2 even uses an actual Linux kernel.

zelly• 7 years ago

This is great news. Microsoft is adopting/forking Rust. That means Rust will be supported for all eternity.

klysm• 7 years ago

It appears to not be an actual fork - the slides say the compiler isn’t implemented

contextfree• 7 years ago

It's just a new, separate research system which has somewhat similar goals to Rust. The headline is basically wrong.

There are also Microsoft teams starting to use Rust, e.g.,

https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/11/07/using-rust-in-win...

throwaway2048• 7 years ago

Or at least Microsoft Visual R++

ta0185762954• 7 years ago

Exactly, for anyone that recalls Visual J++, this should send a shiver down the spine. No, they haven't changed much, yes they do better PR now.

nirui• 7 years ago

That will be very sad if it's the case.

One reason of why I'm using Rust is because it's built by a group of people that I like, and Microsoft is not on that list.

However, I always keep a open-mind, I mean, I don't see anybody will be hurt if Microsoft become a direct contributor of Rust language itself. In fact, I could like Microsoft a bit if they did invest in Rust. I hope they do that <delete>instead of trying to fork things/build something alike (if that's the case here)</delete> (I watched their intro, their design is different than Rust and I somehow like what they did there).

johnhenry• 7 years ago

R, perhaps?

SlowRobotAhead• 7 years ago

Just like Windows on ARM is supported for all of eternity! Or google anything, or any one of a million failed and dead projects.

Cool that MS is using something Ruat based. In no way does that opinion lead to a conclusion of ongoing support.

jsgo• 7 years ago

If they’re rewriting Windows core bits with it, that’d seem a fairly strong indicator their involvement with it is serious. That’d be unnecessary technical debt otherwise.

Windows on ARM is probably fine. Windows Phone and the like eventually lost (losing? I haven’t kept up) support, but phones are traditionally a 2ish year supported device and then they’re not targeted (specifically in the Android OEM arena). Windows proper they have business clients and if they don’t support it for a reasonable amount of time, Microsoft is basically hosed. It is, I imagine, why once they decided to kill off older IEs everything prior to latest and greatest was killed at the same time: they had supported them for far too long and it required killing them all Off in one move.

jangid• 7 years ago

It is not like that. C was supported before GCC project also but it was not of any use because it wasn't widely used. Either we need open source alternatives or there must be competition based on open standards.

dpark• 7 years ago

C was supported before GCC project also but it was not of any use because it wasn't widely used.

I’m pretty sure you’ve got your history backwards. GCC was created specifically to fill the need for a free C compiler for GNU. By that time C was already popular by association with Unix.

xvilka6• 7 years ago

EEE strikes again? Why not just use and contribute into the Rust itself? Why creating one more copy? They could have extended C2Rust[1][2] to support C++[3] and C# to ease their migration instead.

[1] https://c2rust.com

[2] https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

[3] https://github.com/immunant/c2rust/issues/162

microcolonel• 7 years ago

Seems like Microsoft really needs Rust. They've completely gutted their prized aggressive prerelease testing, and the quality of the software they expose users to has declined dramatically.

pimeys• 7 years ago

I heard 70% of their bugs are related to memory handling or off-by-one errors. About 7 severe bugs per year. It can cost them from anywhere between 100k to 10M to fix the bugs and problems caused by these bugs.

quantified• 7 years ago

I really like the idea of implementing mutability control at the level of a collective as opposed to a single object. A great many transactions are multi-object.

Love the idea that a Netscape-legacy language has traction there. I hope they don’t return to their pre-Nadella practices.

est31• 7 years ago

Actually in Rust you have a problem where you can't express partial access to a struct at a function level. This means that you can't put some code into a separate function right now, making use of closures/iterators harder. There are attempts to fix this ([1] [2]). If borrow checking is done on collections of objects instead, the problem can be tackled more easily I think.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/53488

[2] http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2018/04/16/rust...

roca• 7 years ago

There's some friction there, but in practice it's easy to work around most of the time. I'm not sure extending the type system there is worth the weight.

aikah• 7 years ago

I'm surprised Microsoft didn't "invent" their own version of Go yet. Actually I'd use it in a heartbeat over Google's if they add generics to it. Just call it "Micro".

LessDmesg3• 7 years ago

This so much! Go would be a great language if it had generics and no "interface {}". I'd use that over any flavor of Rust any day.

kerng• 7 years ago

I'm curious what the next big language iteration will bring. It's been a while that I got excited about a new language, last time was probably C#, but that's 20 years ago... Crazy, that there hasn't been any new language revolution sort of how Java was one. But maybe I should look more into new things like Julia, but they seem a bit niche.

pjmlp16• 7 years ago

Here, https://dlang.org/

olodus• 7 years ago

Zig's comptime is a very simple and minimalistic but still incredibly useful and strong approach to generics. I think that could fit into a language like that. I many ways I find Zig as keeping the minimalism trait that Go has (which they both take from C). But I get that people want a gc sometimes.

jaitsu• 7 years ago

You may, or may not, be aware of this - https://blog.golang.org/why-generics

I believe it's still in the roadmap for Go 2.0

timbit42• 7 years ago

Go is garbage.

Ziomislaw• 7 years ago

embrace, extend, extinguish once again?

craftoman• 7 years ago

I think it's gonna be something good from the creators of Typescript, the most flexible and object oriented language. Microsoft created too many languages compared to any other company and they really one step ahead in this field.

Communitivity• 7 years ago

This so reminds me of when I hear of J#, and again when I heard of C#. Will it be called R#?

danielscrubs2• 7 years ago

Impossible! Java-heads consider this solved! /s

Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

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