But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.
Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).
The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.
I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(
Eliminating some obscure bugs from C code is not worth intruducing a lot of new bugs. GNU coreutils have been used and polished for so long, that it would be far more effective just to fix the issues as they reveal right in the original code. If rewriting removes one kind of bugs while introducing another - then what’s the whole point?
I cannot imagine obviously buggy code from 2020s being more secure than code that has been around since previous century. Again, even if Rust for real is a better solution for security reasons, the way it is being developed and shipped is not how one makes software more secure. Disregarding the license, uutils look like something pursuing hype, not strategical benefits.
Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).
I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(
Eliminating some obscure bugs from C code is not worth intruducing a lot of new bugs. GNU coreutils have been used and polished for so long, that it would be far more effective just to fix the issues as they reveal right in the original code. If rewriting removes one kind of bugs while introducing another - then what’s the whole point?
I cannot imagine obviously buggy code from 2020s being more secure than code that has been around since previous century. Again, even if Rust for real is a better solution for security reasons, the way it is being developed and shipped is not how one makes software more secure. Disregarding the license, uutils look like something pursuing hype, not strategical benefits.