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Ubuntu explores replacing gnu utils with rust based uutils
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this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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I personally don't see the point.
Mainly memory safety;
split(which is also used for other programs likesort) had a memory heap overflow issue last year to name one. The GNU Coreutils are well tested and very well written, the entire suite of programs has a CVE only once every few years from what I can see, but they do exist and most of those would be solved with a memory and type safe language.That said, Rust also handles parallelism and concurrency much better than C ever could, though most of these programs don't really benefit from that or not much since they already handled this quite well, especially for C programs.
Maybe.
Still, there are other sources of bugs beyond memory management.
And i'd rather have GPL-ed potentially unsafe C code to... closed-source Rust code.
To add to @ParetoOptimalDev@lemmy.today
The uutils are MIT licensed, simply put it means “do whatever you want with it, as long as you credit us”.
The coreutils are GPL, simply put “do whatever you want with it but only in other GPL works, also credit us”.
The coreutils make sure forks will also be open source.
While the uutils aren't closed source, they allow you to make closed source forks.
The uutils' license is too permissive.