Exactly 3 years ago on this day, a conference dedicated to the Rust programming language was held in Moscow
The conference is intended both for those who already write certain products in this language, and for those who are looking at it. The event will discuss issues devoted to improving software products by adding or transferring functionality to Rust, as well as the reasons why it can't be done in C/C++.
On OpenNET, a popular Russian-language site dedicated to open and free computer technologies,
news announcing this conference was posted by a user under the pseudonym
QwertyReg, who, in addition, added a dozen other news items promoting the Rust programming language over the course of a couple of weeks. In a related livejournal,
this user demonstrated his ironic attitude to the Rust promotion information he himself published, and provided proof that he received $100 from an unnamed customer for publishing each such news item.
On the website of the Rust Foundation, you can find out that many well-known IT corporations are involved in funding the promotion of this programming language, with Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft being the platinum partners of the foundation. There is also published information on
how you can get grants from this specialised foundation. Earlier this year, it became known that the White House itself, the Democratic Biden administration,
urges developers to dump C and C++, while promoting Rust as a replacement for them:
The new 19-page report from ONCD gave C and C++ as two examples of programming languages with memory safety vulnerabilities, and it named Rust as an example of a programming language it considers safe. In addition, an NSA cybersecurity information sheet from November 2022 listed Rust as programming languages it considers to be memory-safe.
Later, the US Department of Defence's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) itself explicitly
announced ambitious plans to autotranslate C code into Rust.
After more than two decades of grappling with memory safety issues in C and C++, the software engineering community has reached a consensus. It’s not enough to rely on bug-finding tools. The preferred approach is to use “safe” programming languages that can reject unsafe programs at compile time, thereby preventing the emergence of memory safety issues.
Despite the Pentagon's statements about the consensus in this matter, the software development community has quite ambiguous attitude to such initiatives of the US government. There is often
direct criticism of the Rust programming language from
individual developers, and in topical news ‘
comments there are full of, shall we say, negative comments about Rust, Rust users and Rust developers themselves’. In addition, a couple of weeks ago the Rust community ‘
recognized the unsafety of Rust (if used incorrectly)’, so now AWS and the Rust Foundation are ‘crowdsourcing an effort to verify the Rust standard library’, despite the US government's active positioning of Rust as a ‘safe’ language.
In general, the very scheme of promoting the Rust programming language is similar in many ways to the White House's promotion of the
climate change and
LGBT agenda. In these cases, not only are the methods of promotion and funding similar, but the very sources of these major funds are largely the same.
Perhaps, in the case of this consensus of the American intelligence community regarding the Rust programming language, the U.S. government is indeed driven by altruistic motives to increase memory safety in the compiler's operation. But possible ulterior motives for so generously funding the promotion of one of the programming languages cannot be ruled out either. For example, earlier some users published reports about ‘
Proof that the NSA have backdoors in the Rust compiler’.
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