Hacker News: ceteia

New comment by ceteia in "US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere"

ceteia — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 06:36:46 +0000

But can't you then set up a system such that if a person only picks one source or a few sources, and that turns out to be bad, that it primarily impacts negatively only themselves? Letting it be their own responsibility?

New comment by ceteia in "Show HN: A small, simple music theory library in C99"

ceteia — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:19:29 +0000

Nitpicking:

https://github.com/thelowsunoverthemoon/mahler.c/blob/4ebfe8...

Should that type have been mah_acci instead of int? mah_acci doesn't seem to be used anywhere.

Also, have you considered using (edit) designated initializer syntax for some of the function calls that take in structs as arguments?

https://cppreference.com/w/c/language/struct_initialization....

    struct mah_scale scale = mah_get_scale(
        (struct mah_note) {
            .tone=MAH_C,
            .acci=MAH_NATURAL,
            .pitch=4
        },
        &MAH_BLUES_SCALE, notes,
        MAH_ASCEND,
        NULL
    );

New comment by ceteia in "US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere"

ceteia — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 03:21:31 +0000

Would educating people instead and giving them more options for information, not be better than banning access to information?

New comment by ceteia in "Farewell, Rust for web"

ceteia — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:54:24 +0000

Enum matching is one of the better aspects of Rust.

New comment by ceteia in "Farewell, Rust for web"

ceteia — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:38:34 +0000

> When I update the rust compiler, I do so with very little fear. My code will still work. The rust stdlib backwards compatible story has been very solid.

This is not always true, as seen with rustc 1.80 and the time crate. While it only changed type inference, that still caused some projects like Nix a lot of trouble.

New comment by ceteia in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

ceteia — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:01:53 +0000

Indeed, unsafe Rust is overall more difficult than C++, like one speaker at a Rust conference claimed: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/1/30/unsafe-rust/

And you are not being honest nor accurate here.

New comment by ceteia in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

ceteia — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:29:02 +0000

Not Firefox, but Servo has quite a lot of unsafe, even though some of the results are false positives.

https://grep.app/search?f.repo=servo%2Fservo&f.repo.pattern=...

So Servo at the very least cannot be said to be 'safe'. And I believe the Rust code in Firefox is similar.

New comment by ceteia in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

ceteia — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:47:28 +0000

Wasn't the F-35 budget "explosion", or overruns, caused in general by mismanagement? But I will not argue that C++ is perfect. Instead, the ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88 , where US$370 million was lost, with code written in Ada, is an example where Ada was presented as a safer language and even mandated in the military industry, but where it turned out less well in practice. Even proclaimed "safer" languages can have catastrophic failures, and one can suspect that they might even be less safe in practice, especially if they need mandates to be picked. Instead of Ada companies or other organizations lobbying to force industry to use their language, maybe it is better if there is free competition, and then the onus is on the software development companies to deliver high quality. Ada has improved since the 1990s, perhaps because it has been forced to compete fairly with C, C++ and other languages. Following that thinking, increased, not decreased, competition should be encouraged.

Your lucky soul analogy argument doesn't make any sense.

New comment by ceteia in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

ceteia — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:27:08 +0000

People made similar arguments regarding C++ versus Ada. The US military and defense industry even got something like a mandate in the 1990s to only write in Ada.

And then there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88 , where US$370 million was lost. The code was written in Ada.

And using seat belts and wearing helmets do not help in those cases where 'unsafe' is used to take the seat belts and helmets off. And that is needed in Rust in a number of types of cases, such as some types of performance-sensitive code.

New comment by ceteia in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

ceteia — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 07:19:03 +0000

How can you be sure? When I looked at for instance sudo-rs, it proclaimed loudly that it is memory safe, but its code has lots of unsafe.

https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs

https://grep.app/search?f.repo=trifectatechfoundation%2Fsudo...

And Miri is very popular in Rust. Even if a Rust project doesn't have unsafe, sometimes people still run Miri with it, since dependencies might have messed up their unsafe usage.

New comment by ceteia in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

ceteia — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 07:06:58 +0000

> No, we don't. All of the ones we have are heavily leveraged in Chromium or were outright developed at Google for similar projects. 10s of billions are spent to try to get Chromium to not have these vulnerabilities, using those tools. And here we are.

Chromium is filled with sloppy and old code. Some of the source code (at least if dependencies are included) is more than 20 years old, and a lot of focus has been on performance, not security.

Using Rust does not necessarily solve this. First, performance-sensitive code can require 'unsafe', and unsafe allows for memory unsafety, thus going back to square one, or further back. And second, memory safety isn't the only source of vulnerabilities. Rust's tagged unions and pattern matching help a lot with general program correctness, however, and C++ is lagging behind there.

New comment by ceteia in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

ceteia — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:54:53 +0000

https://materialize.com/blog/rust-concurrency-bug-unbounded-...

Edit: Replying to ghusbands:

'unsafe' is a core part of Rust itself, not a separate language. And it occurs often in some types of Rust projects or their dependencies. For instance, to avoid bounds checking and not rely on compiler optimizations, some Rust projects use vec::get_unchecked, which is unsafe. One occurrence in code is here:

https://grep.app/pola-rs/polars/main/crates/polars-io/src/cs...

And there are other reasons than performance to use unsafe, like FFI.

Edit2: ghusbands had a different reply when I wrote the above reply, but edited it since.

Edit3: Ycombinator prevents posting relatively many new comments in a short time span. And ghusbands is also wrong about his answer not being edited without him making that clear.

New comment by ceteia in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

ceteia — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:23:37 +0000

People also write Rust code that is not memory-safe.

https://materialize.com/blog/rust-concurrency-bug-unbounded-...

New comment by ceteia in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

ceteia — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:58:48 +0000

Does the Rust implementation not use any unsafe and does not use libraries using unsafe?

New comment by ceteia in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

ceteia — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 20:04:20 +0000

Are you really OK with runtime "expression patterns"?

    match (0, 1, 2) {
      case (F(), 0, G()) => ...
    }

> Here (F(), 0, G()) is not an expression, but three separate expressions in a tuple pattern. As a result, this code will call F() but not G(), because the mismatch between the middle tuple elements will cause pattern matching to fail before reaching G(). Other than this short-circuiting behavior, a tuple pattern of expression patterns behaves the same as if it were a single expression pattern.

How would that work with exhaustiveness checking? As far as I can tell, they themselves believe that Carbon's exhaustiveness checking will be very poor.

And OK with implicit conversions? Especially when combined with their way of handling templates for pattern matching?

New comment by ceteia in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

ceteia — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 19:12:24 +0000

Do you know of a good way to measure market share? I know of GitHub's and StackOverflow's surveys, but I'm not sure how well they reflect reality. There is also Redmonk.

GitHub's survey did not say much about Rust I think, despite Rust projects often having lots of starring. Rust projects might have a greater ratio of stars-to-popularity than projects in other languages, though.

StackOverflow's survey was much more optimistic or indicated popularity for Rust.

Redmonk places Rust at place 19th.

New comment by ceteia in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

ceteia — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 19:01:40 +0000

What concerns me is that the design of Carbon in aspects seem to have serious issues already now.

In case that you are well familiar with for instance pattern matching, might you have any opinions on the pattern matching that is currently proposed for Carbon?

https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/docs/design/pattern_matching.ht...

New comment by ceteia in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

ceteia — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 17:49:46 +0000

Rust projects generally use licenses like MIT instead of GPL, and thus some major corporations support Rust a lot, and thus Rust will continue getting popular.

New comment by ceteia in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

ceteia — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 16:05:16 +0000

The GitHub project has some activity at least, and they might be coming with some announcement later this year.

https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/

New comment by ceteia in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

ceteia — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 16:03:54 +0000

I am not sure how Carbon will go. The Carbon compiler is not ready to be used yet by the public as I understand it, and the roadmap has not been updated for some time now, it seems.

https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/docs/project/roadmap.html