Post #3605671

2026-07-05 02:39 UTC

Rust-rewriting is a kind of madness. I like Rust, it’s an amazing language. But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago. The MIT license also is a concern. I understand that many projects use it, and we can’t just reject them because of the license. But here we don’t see an innovation under MIT license - we see a copy of existing GNU tools, with hilarious issues and a corporation-friendly license. The fact uutils are being shipped despite being so raw shows that this is not about better software. The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse. And the quality level of uutils being already shipped tells they either make free alpha testers for the corpos of the users, or there were no competent programmers to take part in the development. C will remain the core of the modern digital world for many years. It is impossible to rewrite everything to Rust in a couple of years. It needs a careful professional approach if we really want this to make software better. But in this case, no one does.

Replies (4)

@Sheldan@lemmy.world 2026-07-05 14:08

Seeing what bun did, maybe all of that C tooling is just a weekend with Claude away from being ported. Not saying that is a good thing, I don’t support that, but what is stopping stupid people from doing that.

Open ##3605670
@PushButton@lemmy.world 2026-07-05 14:16

But bruh, “if it compiles, it works”. Who needs testing now that we have blazing safe rust with AI? “Ship fast and break things”, bruh. That’s the sad point where the software industry is at these days. In a few years people will be locked-in with some proprietary Linux distro variants made by big tech and they will wonder how that happened. People show stop a moment and reflect on why the GNU license exists in the first place.

Open ##3605851
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 2026-07-06 11:22

But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago. Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs). The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse. I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(

Open ##3626269
@TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.world 2026-07-12 06:32

But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago. The uutils author knows this. His motivation was performance. It’s easier to write fast code in Rust for him. The fact uutils are being shipped despite being so raw shows that this is not about better software. The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse. You are mashing two things into one. uutils is just making Open Source software. Canonical ships it despite the project being so raw. uutils don’t have any rights to tell Canonical if and when can the software be incorporated into Ubuntu.

Open ##3755367