alt Hacker News> Rust zealots are in the unfortunate position of having the tiniest bit of objective truth on their side — all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead.
But all other things are not equal, are they? A vital piece of software written in C that has been battle-tested and optimized throughout its two, three, four decades or more of existence does not magically improve if it gets rewritten in Rust. Not only does that not make sense in theory, we've also seen it in reality with the issues with the coreutils rewrites.
You can make a solid argument that new software written completely from zero would be better served by being written in Rust than C. But the "just rewrite it bro" types are so incredibly obnoxious and out of step with reality.
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If you don't like rust for whatever reason, use any other memory safe language. If you need more convincing that bugs and vulns are dropping let and right from decades old battle tested software, ask anyone with access to frontier ai sec models.
Yes, that's exactly my point — they're holding on to what is arguably a tiny kernel of truth, and blowing it way out of proportion. And, to be clear, "zealot" isn't meant as a compliment.
And yes, coreutils is a great example of what I mean. The GNU project was always meant to be the basis for a production grade operating system. I mean, GNU Hello is just a hello world program, and its source weighs in at 707kB zipped (or 3.6MB unzipped). The purpose is having a trivial application that can serve as reference for all the standard practices of the GNU Project. No amount of writing things in Rust can replace the engineering mentality that leads to GNU Hello existing. In comparison, as I understand it uutils was first and foremost an educational project that got coopted into being used in production. Things are very much not alike here.