Ubuntu moving to Rust: Carefully but Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu

jnsgr.uk

15 points·mvip··5 comments

It's good they know they need to be cautious about it (a year seems a bit optimistic though), but "haven’t had many issues" kinda sounds concerning if it means I cannot boot (or given sudo-rs lacks sudoedit currently, locking me out the system)...

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-ox... seems to have more discussions asking why they're not using existing infrastructure to manage the transition.

Pardon my ignorance and I understand the appeal of keeping everything within one cohesive language, but are some of the these core utilities really being made "safer" by rewriting them in rust?

I mean, is 'cp' really unsafe in C and will be magically safe in Rust?

Or is this partly to appeal to the comfort of having one uniform language?

Admittedly in the long term regardless these rewrites may well pay off quite well.

There's some information from the project on this here: https://uutils.github.io/blog/2025-02-extending/

I see they state:

"Is it really safer?

While Rust is better than C/C++ for security, these programs are often already very safe. Security is not the key argument for us in this rewrite even if Rust provides some automatic improvements."

I think that answers my question. Thanks!

I think the safety of those tools as a static, unchanging code base is not a major concern, but when you're writing and maintaining code, every code change is a potential source of new bugs, and Rust does eliminate large classes of bugs as things to be worried about.

That said, I actually think that it's pretty likely that switching to using the Rust tools is going to turn up quite a few new non-memory-safety-related (ie: logic) bugs.

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