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Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

I’m a huge proponent of Rust and generally lean a lot closer to the RIIR mentality than most, but this effort seems to be such a waste of effort and resources.

There have been a dozen CVEs reported against all of coreutils in the past twenty years. The most recent audit of uutils-coreutils turned up forty-four CVEs.

By all appearances they’re replacing battle-tested and fundamental tooling which hasn’t been a problem with extremely amateurish Rust. The threading highlighted in the linked post above seems pretty egregious.

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I think this is more about the licence, the Rust rewrite just makes it easier to swallow/gain contributors.

Yes, these proclamations of Rust devs that 'the future belongs to us', aren't getting any new fans for the language. Here's my rebuttal:

YOU have proclaimed the language to be as fast as C while being safe. YOU need to prove it. Think of this as an OPPORTUNITY to PROVE that Rust can walk the walk, and you can make Rust coreutils as fast as the C one. Think hard about how you can model low level Linux constructs safely. Fix your libs. Fix the compiler. This is the yardstick you need to meet. You are making free software, and the thing about it is users are free to choose otherwise. YOU need to prove that Rust is just as fast and lightweight as C, and once you do, we'll be happy to adopt.

Right now, dear Rust devs, what you are doing is the same as AI companies are doing - you're trying to usurp power based on extremely nebulous conjured threats. Nobody likes being threatened.

Same here. Love Rust. Hate rust rewrites.

The worst thing about rust are the people using it.

My impression is that go developers moved to rust.

I doubt it, as Rust approach to language design is the antithesis of Go's culture.

I would appreciate Go much more otherwise.

Can vouch for the sentiment, hence why regardless of the ranting, I am quite supportive of whatever helps to improve C and C++ security story.

Also for Rust based rewrites, they could start by bootstraping Rust compiler itself, dependent on C++ to start it.

They don't do it, because even though LLVM and GCC are written in C++, a pure Rust compiler would not scale to the same level of contributions, and existing capabilities.

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