commented:
Why don't they use Rust for these tools?

  commented:
Hello! I made Soteria's core :)
The main two reasons are:

Rust doesn't have monads. Writing a symbolic execution engine without
making mistakes is really difficult, and having the ability to hide
parts behind monads and pretty syntax has been a huge boon
Symbolic execution branches. When you branch, a lot of things end up
being shared between the branches. I haven't figured out how to do
this efficiently without a garbage collector

And then a few other things, e.g. algebraic effects, are making our
life so easy.
That being said, writing Soteria (the core, mainly Symex.ml) in Rust,
is an open challenge and we welcome propositions :p

  commented:
Maybe because the authors are more familiar with Rust? Soteria
founders have this paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3808306
(haven't read it yet). IMO I don't see what Rust provides here that is
a major selling point over OCaml.
Why is OCaml a bad choice here? There are many many similar tools for
program analysis written in OCaml (Infer, Semgrep, Trust-in-Soft and
so on).

  commented:
OCaml's awesome, but it seems like a sensible default to write a
language's tooling in that language, so I'd expect a particular reason
but couldn't find one reading around. (People often call Rust an OCaml
(or ML?) though too, complicating matters.)

  commented:
soteria aims to target many languages, not just rust

  commented:
I thought they called Rust an ML? (Not to be pedantic - I just haven’t
heard anyone conflate OCaml and Rust before.)

  commented:
Back when /r/rust/ had RSS feeds, I called Rust an ML-lineage language
disguised by the addition of ownership and borrowing and its use of
C++ syntax on multiple occasions.
Heck, basically every bit of syntax that couldn't be borrowed from C++
for familiarity traces back to Ocaml.
Some examples:

let for variable declaration and postfix type annotations separated
with colons
'a (Ocaml's equivalent to <T> for generics, because, on an
abstract/theoretical level, Rust's lifetimes are a special type of
generic parameter, right down to "a" apparently being the habitual
default type variable name, just like "T" is in C++)
Option (option in Ocaml), Some, and None
match
fn (fun or function in Ocaml)
-> and => (just -> in Ocaml) for function returns and match
arms
()


  commented:
Garbage collection makes it a lot easier to deal with graphs in
memory.
.