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Ubuntu Will Replace GNU Core Utilities With Rust
(tube.archworks.co)
I can finally stop calling it GNU/Linux.
Literally why? Not even criticizing rust but the GNU core utils are easily some of the most reliable and documented software tools ever written.
Not to mention, looks like the rust core utils are MIT and not GPL.
Wait is this their way to break compatibility with old binaries so that you're forced to use snap?
They're steadily climbing the test suit:
That's extremely unexpected.
The GNU utils weren't written by Canonical so they were doomed from the start.
Not to worry, they'll ship 'em via snap.
Straight to jail.
Why?
Because why? I can expect a very niche distro like Cachy do it but not a big project with a serious market share.
Canonical has a long history of doing wacky shit that nobody asked for though. Unity, upstart, snap, probably other things that I'm not thinking of
What about licences and FOSS?
According to the video it's MIT licence, and they discuss the risk of such a licence vs coreutils usage of the GPL
This worries me indeed.
Ubuntu continues to show that it's the absolute worst.
Is there any actual benefit ?
Well the rust project is MIT licensed, so definitely not.
I thought MIT licensing was a good thing?? What am i missing??
The success of FOSS can in large part be attributed to copyleft licenses like the GPL. Without the protections of copyleft clauses, software just gets exploited by large corporations and end users are locked out. For just one example, if GNU software had used MIT, the entire free router movement (i.e ddwrt, openwrt and co.) would probably not exist today.
See: Free Software Foundation, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc..
Edit: actually, I think by the time of this specific lawsuit, the sources for wrt54g were already released after community pressure, this article details the history a bit better.
In large part it's a matter of opinions and different perspectives. A common consensus is libraries should be MIT and entire applications should be GPL. However, this is not held by all community members.
Overall, Rust is easier to read and harder to fuck up, so there's one argument in favour if it, in terms of community engagement. For an example of this, compare ls.c by Apple, GNU, FreeBSd and OpenBSD.
On the other hand, I should imagine most people simply install ripgrep and fd anyway.
Just security and hype afaik.
No, it isn't just hype. The hype is justified.
Outside of security you have some very really world benefits, like performance gains in various scenarios as well as lots more people willing to contribute and a much better type system (more maintainability).
Exactly! I would never PR, extend or build off find.c, And I sure as shit I'm not gonna work on C or C++ in my own free time. However, Rust is really fun to use, and it's got a great ecosystem. In this vein, this is a good thing for the community, and it's not just hype.
The Fish blog post discussed this and I think they had a good point when they were talking about how hard it was to get contributors from a large pool when they were working with C++.
Without a doubt, anything you can do in Rust you can do in C and C++, but I think it's fair to say the large majority of people are going to be more productive in Rust or at least have a more enjoyable development experience.
Code written in Rust has been shown to have significantly fewer security vulnerabilities than code written in C. Distributions like Ubuntu ship a lot of security updates, so by switching to Rust-based utils, they can reduce their workload in the long run.
It's been proven faster. That's all I personally know.
Nothing except for binary coding can be faster than C I think.
Rust is better for writing multithreaded applications which means that the small amount of utilities that can utilize parallelism receive a significant speedup. uutils multithreaded sort was apparently 6x faster than the GNU utils single threaded version.
P.S. I strongly doubt handwritten assembly is more efficient than modern C compilers.
P.S. I strongly doubt handwritten assembly is more efficient than modern C compilers.
As with everything, it all depends.
When writing super efficient assembly you write towards the destination and not necessarily to fit higher level language constructs. There are often ways to cut corners for aspects not needed, reduction in instructions and loops all based on well designed assembly.
The problem is you aren't going to do that for every single CPU instruction because it would take forever and not provide a good ROI. It is far more common to write 99% of your system code in C and then write just the parts that can really benefit from fine tuned assembly. And please note that unless you're writing for an RTOS or something crazy critical on efficiency, its going to be even less assembly.
Rust is good, rare Ubuntu W. Now stop with the forced use of snaps.
You think this is a win, but is just another step in the enshittification.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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