The C++ V8 api is very reasonable to be used in a safe way. So i dont see this as a good point unless of course for people that wan to write some parts that need to be optimized in Rust.
Don't deal with NodeJs that much, but is a lot of node functionality in C++ modules? and if so they are presenting a lot of security bugs in a way that Rust might see appealing?
Because by not having direct access to the V8 api in its native language might limit you, the "glue coder", in the things you really can do.
Maybe this is not the best way of putting it. They use Rust for all the system bits including networking, so it's not like they just wrote some JS to V8/C++ glue code in Rust.
Ok, but even if there's more Rust code in it, i think the expectations of the parent poster are unreal, as for safety, only if V8 VM were rewritten in Rust, and giving its a JIT VM sensitive portions of code would need to be in 'unsafe{}' anyway, so how much safer would it turn out to be even than?
Anyway in security terms it will probably turn out negligible as the percentage of code in safe Rust are probably low compared to the whole thing.
Than in memory usage, if it replicates Eletron,it would turned out almost the same, giving is not the C++ core the one that is most memory hungry.. is mostly the renderer process with WebKit and V8 executing big portions of javascript code in memory.
Giving if such a branch existed, it would use typescript which in turn is the same V8/javascript pipeline that is memory hungry.
So, addressing to the parent poster, i don't think it would change much in terms of security or memory pressure if compared to Electron.
Sometimes i think Rust give some people high expectations, that it would be very hard to actually replicate in real life experiences, giving software is much more complex and as in Deno, requires other core parts that cannot be realistically rewritten in Rust, and even if they could, while we can see how software written in Rust can be safer, it still needs to prove the claim for bigger, sensitive pieces of software that requires a lot of "unsafe" techniques to work like JIT's and OS's and therefore might not feel that much of a difference giving the size and complexity of the project.
Ryan Dahl has talked about why he chose Rust at various times. The original prototype was actually written in Go but was ported to Rust to avoid garbage-collection issues. The real reason for these languages over C++ was more about maintainability than type safety or speed. Ryan seems to be pretty happy with Rust so far which is a good sign but doesn't mean that there are direct benefits to users.
The C++ V8 api is very reasonable to be used in a safe way. So i dont see this as a good point unless of course for people that wan to write some parts that need to be optimized in Rust.
Don't deal with NodeJs that much, but is a lot of node functionality in C++ modules? and if so they are presenting a lot of security bugs in a way that Rust might see appealing?
Because by not having direct access to the V8 api in its native language might limit you, the "glue coder", in the things you really can do.