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Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds With Latest Incompatibility
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
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GNU Coreutils have worked very well for so long so replacing it is totally pointless unless memory safety has crippled the project somehow till now.
Also I really hate that project for another reason - License
Yep. And more distros support so theres more incentive to fix any issues that have popped up. Plus theres more c devs in the world than rust.
Rust is absolutely not faster or easier than C. It's safer but that's it.
The issue with the rust utils license is that its MIT. Which many people see as vastly inferior to GPL. This is a very big deal to people who believe in the GPL.
It is definitely easier.
Don't try and tell me cargo is not easier than fucking around with the C/CPP build slop I've had to screw around with over the years.
The coreutils license is bullshit but let's not pretend languages have not improved in 50 years.
Yeah, the only real issue I have with the “rewrite it in Rust” approach is the absolute plague of permissive licensing. It is much easier to write safe, correct code in Rust.
I think it depends on the project, when writing cp you're not really messing around with libraries so good ol make is fine
Cargo != Rust
There is no word in which the borrow checker is easier to deal with than C.
I think responding to borrow checker errors is easier than debugging some random segfault
Also I don't separate the language and it's build system. I have to use it to write the language it's an entire kit.
Part of c/cpp problem is it's build system and dependency story just serves to get in my way instead of letting me write code. The syntax is irrelevant when I'm fucking with some auto conf script because the version on my machine is 0.01 versions different.
Depends on what you mean by "easier". It is easier to write safe code in Rust.
Memory safe!
Not any other kind of safety.
Yes, that's what Rust is about.
So your statement that it's easier to write safe code in rust is only (arguably) true for one aspect of safety.
Ehm no... But it makes writing memory safe code in Rust easier by default than C.
Depends on what you do, really.
Dangers of this project:
No, it does not depend on what I do. In Rust it is by definition easier to write safe code than in C.
Sure does. If the tool was used for 50 years and 1000s times checked (also by criminals), your reimplementarion will not be safer for a whole while, memory safety or not. Especially with that huge scope.
Ehm, thats not what I said? Let try me again: If you write code in C and in Rust, both spend about 5 years time and check them equally often, with equally amount of experience, then it is by default easier to write the safe code in Rust. Because Rust is safe by default.
If you compare a new project to an old project, that has nothing to do with my statement.
But we have the context "Rust coreutils" here.
The statement I was referring to and answering to wasn't in context. It was an absolute statement about the language itself:
I am not suggesting that throwing decades old tested and developed code is immediately safer than rewriting it from scratch. Sometimes a rewrite (be it in same language or different) might result in better code, given time. But that is not what I was replying and discussing to.
And base64 util did become better
They're also free and open source, which unix wasn't.
And which license do you suppose you gain/lose more from?
These guys are so brain dead.
I actually don't have to do that at all. It'd be one thing if i, or anyone else in this thread, were saying that the problem with derivative works is that they aren't originals, but that's not the point at all.
This isn't about venerating copyright in the abstract, it's about infrastructure and longgevity.
If you're not just shit posting and actually want to understand the issues at stake, it just so happens that i wrote bout this yesterday:
https://reddthat.com/comment/27650211
It is more of like understand, beware, and avoid going in that direction. They are legally allowed to do it, but its still bad...
Rust is web scale!