alt Hacker NewsPeople thinking that using a superior tool (on paper) enables them to automatically write better tools than the ones who are battle tested over the years baffles me to no end.
Yes, you can go further, possibly faster. OTOH, nothing replaces experience and in-depth knowledge. GNU Coreutils embodies that knowledge and experience. uutils has none, and just tries to distill it with tests against the GNU one.
...and they get 44 CVEs as a result in their first test.
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There was an article posted to HN recently that enumerated bugs in the rust rewrite.
Iirc the bugs had to do with linux system details like fs toctou and other things you'd only find out about in production.
Ideally we'd have a better way of navigating platform idiosyncrasies or better system APIs, so that every project doesn't have to relearn them at runtime. But the rewrite isn't pure downside.
My read on those was basically that the classic filesystems are hopelessly broken and we need ACID guarantees in the next-gen filesystems, like 20 years ago.
Not saying all of them were about FS TOCTOU bugs but once I got to these, that was my takeaway.
Obviously just using Rust cannot fix _all_ bugs, and I reject any criticisms towards Rust rewrites that tear down this particular straw man (its goal being to make it impossible to argue against). That's toxic and I get surprised every time people on HN try to argue in that childish way.
But if we can remove all C memory safety foot guns then that by itself is worth a lot already.
Losing decades-old knowledge on how the dysfunctional lower-level systems work would be regrettable and even near-fatal for any such projects. That I'd agree with. But it also raises the question on whether those lower-level systems don't need a very hard long look and -- eventually -- a replacement.