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Comment by pepoluan | Hacker News Reader

The "rust is better" point is always "prevent memory-related bugs from happening".

Memory-related bugs is, like, 70% of bugs found in programs written in C and C++.

So, by rewriting in Rust, you prevent 70% of new bugs from happening, because a whole class of bugs just cease to exist.

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But that's hardly relevant to coreutils, is it? Do these utilities even manage memory?

These are command line utilities meant to be a human porcelain for libc. And last I checked, libc was C.

Ideally these should be developed in tandem, and so should the kernel. This is not the case in Linux for historical reasons, but some of the other utilities such as iputils and netfilter are. The kernel should be Rust long before these porcelain parts are.

~70% of bugs in NEW code, in companies, that have mottos like "move fast and break things". The same study, found that old C, C++ codebases tends to have these once in a blue moon and other bug classes are more prevalent.

Only if you don't use unsafe though. If you look at almost any real-world project written in Rust, you'll find tons and tons of `unsafe` in its dependency tree.

In safe rust, yes. But in unsafe rust, no guarantees. And as long as rust itself is unsafe, you cannot call it safe.

Congratulations to you on being the 10000th? person [0] to miss the point of unsafe/safe.

1. Unsafe doesn't mean the code is actually unsafe. It only tells you that the compiler itself cannot guarantee the correctness of it.

2. Unsafetiness tells the code reviewers to give a specific section of code more scrunity. Clippy also has an option that requires the programmer to put a comment to explain how the unsafe code is actually safe in the context.

3. And IF a bug does occur, it minimizes the amount of code you need to audit.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

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