I was working on rooc, a modeling language for optimization problems running in the web; After months of “just one more feature” i decided to stop

A rustc soundness bug in the wild

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2024-11-14 23:00:02

I was working on rooc, a modeling language for optimization problems running in the web; After months of “just one more feature” i decided to stop adding new things to the language, and instead focus on improving the solvers, which so far implemented only a very simple one which i developed.

The easiest way to do this is to find pure rust libraries, which would allow me to simply compile the rust code to the wasm target.

After many failed attempts at compiling for wasm, searching through the whole crates.io, i stumbled upon minilp, a rust only linear programming library. Perfect!

But wait… “The project was archived 2 years ago, last commit 4 years ago”, oh well, i heard that rust is a stable language, so it should be fine, right?

After discovering the library i immediately added it as a solver to rooc, which was as easy as adding an adapter that transformed a LinearModel into a minilp::Problem.

My only chance was getting minilp to work, it seemed like there were no weird dependencies, no usage of OS specific things, so it should have worked on the web.