Comment by dap
5 hours ago
I guess you’re being facetious but for those who didn’t click through:
> This type of code error is prevented by languages with strong type systems. In our replacement for this code in our new FL2 proxy, which is written in Rust, the error did not occur.
That bit may be true, but the underlying error of a null reference that caused a panic was exactly the same in both incidents.
Yep: it is wild for them to claim that a strongly-typed language would have saved them when it didn't.
Relying on language features instead of writing code well will always eventually backfire.
You're right that you have to "write code well" to prevent this sort of thing. It's also true that Rust's language features, if you use them, can make this sort of mistake a compile-time error rather than something that only blows up at runtime under the wrong conditions. The problem with their last outage was that somebody explicitly opted out of the tool provided by the language. As you say, that's "not writing code well". But I think you're dismissing the value of the language feature in helping you write code well.