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this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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Rust-coreutils may eventually become a suitable replacement for coreutils but it hasn't yet existed for long enough to iron out all the bugs and there's no real advantage to using it right now.
The idea is that Rust will make everything easier to maintain and improve in the long run, or something like that. It's somewhat plausible, but it's not totally obvious whether that will prove correct. So it's easy to suspect that there must be some other unstated motivations behind it, although to me there don't appear to be any in view.
I think with things like this that are so foundational and far-reaching, there's a point where you kind of just have to decide that the new thing is good enough and be ready for the rough parts of the transition.
Time is definitely a huge component of making a robust piece of software, but I think user diversity is also really important, and a project is going to hit a plateau of features and stability without wider adoption (even if it's meant as a replacement for an existing thing) because the people working on it just don't know about certain edge cases and don't know to look for them.
That's not me saying we should be migrating libraries and software just because someone remade them in a new language, but from what I know of Rust, it really does sound like a safer and and more approachable language than C++ and especially C.
The motivations are purely dogmatic. Buggy and incomplete implementations have no place in mainstream distros.