Rust has a HUGE supply chain security problem
kerkour.com
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July 2, 2024

Sylvain Kerkour writes:

Rust adoption is stagnating not because it’s missing some feature pushed by programming language theory enthusiasts, but because of a lack of focus on solving the practical problems that developers are facing every day.

… no company outside of AWS is making SDKs for Rust … it has no official HTTP library.

As a result of Rust’s lack of official packages, even its core infrastructure components need to import hundreds of third-party crates.

  • cargo imports over 400 crates.

  • crates.io has over 500 transitive dependencies.

…the offical libsignal (from the Signal messaging app) uses 500 third-party packages.

… what is really inside these packages. It has been found last month that among the 999 most popular packages on crates.io, the content of around 20% of these doesn’t even match the content of their Git repository.

…how I would do it (there may be better ways):

A stdx (for std eXtended) under the rust-lang organization containing the most-needed packages. … to make it secure: all packages in stdx can only import packages from std or stdx. No third-party imports. No supply-chain risks.

[stdx packages to include, among others]:

gzip, hex, http, json, net, rand

Read Rust has a HUGE supply chain security problem

Submitter’s note:

I find the author’s writing style immature, sensationalist, and tiresome, but they raise a number of what appear to be solid points, some of which are highlighted above.

  • Anders429@programming.dev
    3·
    6 months ago

    So, the argument was that there was absolutely no way whatsoever that one could figure out they needed to depend on mio for a good event loop interface. It was totally an insurmountable task!

    You still see this same mindset now with people making things like blessed.rs. It’s the same idea, just not wrapped into a library. I find it hilarious when it gets shared in discussions and some people go “oh wow so helpful!”, as if we all couldn’t have found serde and rand on crates.io without it.