> Suggesting a tabula rasa rewrite of NSS would more likely be met with genuine concern for your mental well-being, than by incredulity or skepticism.
In my experience, porting code more or less directly from one language to another is faster and easier than people assume. Its certainly way faster than I assumed. I hand ported chipmunk2d to javascript a few years ago. Its ~30k LOC and it took me about a month to get my JS port working correctly & cleaned up. I spend up throughout the process. By the end I had a bunch of little regexes and things which took care of most of the grunt work.
If we assume that rate (about 1kloc / person-day) then porting boringssl (at 356kloc[1]) to rust would take about one man-year (though maybe much less). This is probably well worth doing. If we removed one heartbleed-style bug from the source code on net as a result, it would be a massive boon.
(But it would probably be much more expensive than that because the new code would need to be re-audited.)
In my experience, porting code more or less directly from one language to another is faster and easier than people assume. Its certainly way faster than I assumed. I hand ported chipmunk2d to javascript a few years ago. Its ~30k LOC and it took me about a month to get my JS port working correctly & cleaned up. I spend up throughout the process. By the end I had a bunch of little regexes and things which took care of most of the grunt work.
If we assume that rate (about 1kloc / person-day) then porting boringssl (at 356kloc[1]) to rust would take about one man-year (though maybe much less). This is probably well worth doing. If we removed one heartbleed-style bug from the source code on net as a result, it would be a massive boon.
(But it would probably be much more expensive than that because the new code would need to be re-audited.)
[1] https://www.openhub.net/p/boringssl/analyses/latest/language...