rsc

As a long-time open-source maintainer, I find all the second-guessing and armchair psychoanalysis here (not just in this comment, all over HN) about Tridge's motivations, state of mind, and so on incredibly off-putting.

Tridge doesn't owe anyone anything as far as rsync is concerned. Yet he is spending his time maintaining it, only to be attacked for his efforts.

To respond to the specific technical point, there really _is_ a flood of security reports arriving everywhere in the past few months. The jury is out on whether Mythos is that much better than alternatives, but even the publicly available models are _highly_ capable of finding real problems, and they are being employed to that end quite effectively. Here are the counts of security issues fixed in each monthly Go minor release going back to the start of 2024:

     0 2024-01-09 Go 1.21.6, Go 1.20.13
     0 2024-02-06 Go 1.21.7, Go 1.20.14
     5 2024-03-05 Go 1.22.1, Go 1.21.8
     1 2024-04-03 Go 1.22.2, Go 1.21.9
     2 2024-05-07 Go 1.22.3, Go 1.21.10
     2 2024-06-04 Go 1.22.4, Go 1.21.11
     1 2024-07-02 Go 1.22.5, Go 1.21.12
     0 2024-08-06 Go 1.22.6, Go 1.21.13
     3 2024-09-05 Go 1.23.1, Go 1.22.7
     0 2024-10-01 Go 1.23.2, Go 1.22.8
     0 2024-11-06 Go 1.23.3, Go 1.22.9
     0 2024-12-03 Go 1.23.4, Go 1.22.10
     
     2 2025-01-16 Go 1.23.5, Go 1.22.11
     1 2025-02-04 Go 1.23.6, Go 1.22.12
     1 2025-03-04 Go 1.24.1, Go 1.23.7
     1 2025-04-01 Go 1.24.2, Go 1.23.8
     1 2025-05-06 Go 1.24.3, Go 1.23.9
     3 2025-06-05 Go 1.24.4, Go 1.23.10
     1 2025-07-08 Go 1.24.5, Go 1.23.11
     2 2025-08-06 Go 1.24.6, Go 1.23.12
     1 2025-09-03 Go 1.25.1, Go 1.24.7
    10 2025-10-07 Go 1.25.2, Go 1.24.8
     * 2025-10-13 Go 1.25.3, Go 1.24.9
     0 2025-11-05 Go 1.25.4, Go 1.24.10
     2 2025-12-02 Go 1.25.5, Go 1.24.11
    
     6 2026-01-15 Go 1.25.6, Go 1.24.12
     2 2026-02-04 Go 1.25.7, Go 1.24.13
     5 2026-03-05 Go 1.26.1, Go 1.25.8
    10 2026-04-07 Go 1.26.2, Go 1.25.9
    11 2026-05-07 Go 1.26.3, Go 1.25.10
     3 2026-06-02 Go 1.26.4, Go 1.25.11

* The Go 1.25.3 and Go 1.24.9 releases were a fast follow to fix a problem introduced by one of the security fixes the previous week.

You can see that 2026 has been quite different from the previous years. There are plenty of other contemporaneous accounts from other security teams about the load increase they've seen (which again is almost entirely not Mythos).

Also, the number of reports we are receiving has gone up far faster than the number of actual vulnerabilities. Over the 75-month period from January 2020 to early April 2026, the final 30 days accounted for ~16% of the reports.

It is easy to believe that Tridge is seeing a similar flood of reports. More reports means more fixes means more code changes means more bugs.

The $20K was the total across all the files scanned, not just the one with the bug.

Raises hand.

This is a strange and dangerous thing to try to do from assembly. In particular, all these details about write barriers being hand-coded in the assembly are subject to change from release to release.

Better to structure your code so that you do the pointer manipulation (and allocation) in Go code instead, and leave assembly only for what is absolutely necessary for performance (usually things like bulk operations, special instructions, and so on).

The parent comment is the first time I've said anything publicly (it has only been a few weeks). I didn't feel like it needed an announcement, but since it came up, it seemed worth correcting. It's not a state secret. :-)

In my August announcement, I was careful to say I wasn't leaving the Go project. I'm still involved with the Go project and expect to keep being involved. I'm just not officially on the Go team at Google anymore. Stepping back from the actual team to give others room to lead always seemed to me both likely and appropriate.

Officially, I have left the Go team too; I started on a new team at Google a few weeks ago. I still use Go quite a bit, I still talk to people on the Go team regularly, and you will still see the occasional code change, code review, or blog post from me. Most importantly, I have high confidence that the team we built will do an excellent job continuing the work.

Those are semantically different (one is nil and one is not) but neither allocates.

We had to do some Plan 9 work, which makes sense when doing something new, but the actual Tailscale implementation is far _less_ work than for other Unixes.

In the link in the parent comment. :-)

People who go install it get an error that it's not a valid source tree at all.