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Comment by SQueeeeeL | Hacker News Reader

Not the original poster, but coreutils are almost given similar design requirements as airplane software. They need to be fast and they need to be perfect. Having a dependency tree which invokes items that (potentially) don't place as much emphasis on being error free can lead to buggy software.

Remember, there is no reason for anyone to choose the rust implementation, other than philosophy. They need to match or surpass the C implementations with an extreme degree of consistency to be worth the risk of transferring.

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So they vetted a library and chose a version. That version is the version they will use until they choose another version - that's how rust works. It's not npm, you specify a specific version and that's the code that's used, no matter how upstream changes things. It's not C where you load some random .so with the right name and hope that it's compatible (or have entire giant systems built around managing library compatabilites ala Linux distros).

I've got code in prod that uses pre-async versions of tokio and it still builds and runs just fine with the latest rust nightly. If there does turn out to be a problem with the version of some library I chose, and upstream has become incompatible, nothing stops me from vendoring the upstream and fixing the problem my own way. Until then, cargo/crates/rust guarantee that the code I vetted and chose is the code I'll build with. Why is it so vital if the sequence of bytes is stored one place or another?

> It's not npm, you specify a specific version and that's the code that's used, no matter how upstream changes things.

Note that that _is_ how NPM behaves. (At least, when using a lock file, which is the default behaviour like with Cargo. If you don't use lock files then neither Cargo not NPM can guarantee this property.)

vetting, and dependency locking, addresses nearly all the issues. there's one other issue: the ability to easily adjust the code as you see fit, so it is vital that you are able to precisely control the code.

> Not the original poster, but coreutils are almost given similar design requirements as airplane software.

I mean, a lot probably are used in literal airplane software.

It also has to be good from as early as possible; some software still in use uses decades old code and libraries which cannot easily be replaced (think also embedded software).

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