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Comment by jabwd

2 months ago

Yeah I got one, why? You aren't learning anything, you are just copying code from other codebases and smashing it together to make some nginx-rust thingie... for what actual goal?

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jabwd

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ianm218  2 months ago

Well the biggest goal was to be useful. Nginx serves ~20% of the web, memory unsafe languages might just become untractable for critical exposed to the web infra if the rate of critical CVE's on these rises faster than they can be patched, so a drop in replacement would be a big deal in that world.

But in terms of learning I'm learning relatively little about how to type Rust into an editor but a lot about how to set up agentic loops that can autonomously get tests to pass and improve performance.

For example if you just tell a frontier model (gpt5.5 or Claude Code 4.8) to make some portion of the tests pass they will take forever and just bang their heads against it. I developed a framework to mimic a lot of these tests in nginx... but in minimum non blocking ways so you can run many in parallel with short feedback loops.

Similar for performance - how to make tons of performance benchmark and expose maximum telemetry for agents to go and analyze the hotpaths etc.

  • tredre3  2 months ago

    > Nginx serves ~20% of the web, memory unsafe languages might just become untractable for critical exposed to the web infra if the rate of critical CVE's on these rises faster than they can be patched

    That is true, however did you actually do any research into nginx? Is it particularly prone to memory bugs?

    I honestly don't know the answer but you seem to be coming from a place of C bad, therefore nginx super vulnerable?

    In my experience with other web servers the vast majority of security bugs are string handling related (path/header injection), which your rewrite will not protect you from.

  • fvdessen  2 months ago

    You mean you rewrote the nginx test suite with smaller leaner tests ? How did you bootstrap that ? How do you know the leaner tests are equivalent to the real ones ?

    • ianm218  2 months ago

      Here is an example https://github.com/ianm199/nginx-rs-port/blob/main/crates/ng...

      Basically I use these "kits" to prove that the behavior is working as expected with mocked data/ interfaces and then only after these kits pass I'll run the real test suite files as confirmation. So these let you iterate a lot faster than the official test suite because it is very slow.

      These are bootstrapped from the real tests.

      The other commenter was being a bit dismissive but this is the kind of thing I'm taking away as a real useful pattern to do verification of behavior at scale.

  • xorcist  2 months ago

    > the biggest goal was to be useful

    Please excuse me for being unnecessarily harsh for a moment, but web servers are a dime a dozen. Quite literally. The reason nginx is successful is because it is maintained. Unless you plan on maintaining your nginx-clone as well as nginx itself, it will not be useful.

    Perhaps you do, in which case I am more than happy to be wrong, but sometimes people think the act of writing software itself is useful and that other people will happily swarm over it and maintain it in their absence, but that is usually not the case.

    The world has tens of thousands of http daemons, increasing that number by one is not useful in itself. The act of maintaining software over time and keeping it useful for many people however, absolutely can be.

  • jabwd  2 months ago

    Buddy, I think it is time to not engage with these models for a bit, you seem to have lost your mind.

jauntywundrkind  2 months ago

One very strong draw I feel, that's mentioned in this article: Rust's portability, it's ability to be compiled to wasm & run very well anywhere.