An interesting aspect of this effort is that it undoubtesly makes modifying these tools much easier. While GNU and the FSF are all about legally ensuring the ability to read and modify their code, they have, in practice, made it almost impossible to do so for entirely technical reasons. I’m a pretty good C programmer and whenever I’ve looked at even simple GNU tools like `cat` or god forbid GNU libc’s `printf` code (this one is actually kind of delightful it’s so nuts), I have despaired of understanding, let alone modifying, the code. GNU coreutils are such a morass of preprocessor defines and bonkers C code to support every legacy system GNU has ever run on, that it might as well only be distributed in binary form. I think it would literally be easier to decompile most GNU tools and modify the decompiled platform-specific source than to make the same modification to the source as shipped. Rust has a steep learning curve, but learning Rust is a picnic compared to figuring out how to modify just one GNU tool, and of course they’re all different. Rust puts the onus of portability where it belongs: in the language and compiler, instead of forcing it on every single programmer and application.