> Only among those that don't understand that, if this is a problem, then it is Canonical problem, not a Rust problem.

(This is hard to express in a careful way where I'm confident of not offending anyone. Please take me at my word that I'm not trying to take sides in this at all.)

The dominant narrative behind this pushback, as far as I can tell, is nothing to do with the Rust language itself (aside perhaps from a few fringe people who see the adoption of Rust as some kind of signal of non-programming-related politics, and who are counter-signaling). Rather, the opposition is to re-implementing "working" software (including in the sense that nobody seems to have noticed any memory-handling faults all this time) for the sake of seemingly nebulous benefits (like compiler-checked memory safety).

The Rust code will probably also be more maintainable by Rust developers than the C code currently is by C developers given the advantages of Rust's language design. (Unless it turns out that the C developers are just intrinsically better at programming and/or software engineering; I'm pretty skeptical of that.) But most long-time C users are probably not going to want to abandon their C expertise and learn Rust. And they seem to outnumber the new Rust developers by quite a bit, at least for now.

> Rather, the opposition is to re-implementing "working" software

I understand the argument, and its sounds good as far as most things go, but it misses an important fact: In OSS, you can and should find your own bliss. If you want to learn Rust, as I did, you can do it by reimplementing uutils' sort and ls, and fixing bugs in cp and mv, as I did. That was my bliss. OSS doesn't need to be useful to anyone. OSS can be a learning exercise or it can be simply for love of the game.

The fact that Canonical wants to ship it, right now, simply makes them a little silly. It doesn't say a thing about me, or Rust, or Rust culture.

> The dominant narrative behind this pushback, as far as I can tell, is nothing to do with the Rust language itself (aside perhaps from a few fringe people who see the adoption of Rust as some kind of signal of non-programming-related politics, and who are counter-signaling).

Difficult to say with certainty, because it's easy to dress "political" resistance in respectable preference for stability. (Scare quotes because it's an amalgam in which politics is just a part.) Besides, TFA is Phoronix, whose commentariat is not known for subtlety on this topic.

Replacing coreutils is risky because of the decades of refinement/stagnation (depending on your viewpoint) which will inevitably produce snags when component utilities interact in ways unforeseen by tests -- as has happened here. But without risk there's no reward. Of course, what's the reward here is subject to debate. IMO the self-evident advantage of a rewrite is that it's prima facie evidence of interest in using the language, which is significant if there's a dearth of maintainers for the originals. (The very vocal traditionalists are usually not in a hurry to contribute.)

so why create Wayland when we had X? why create another linux distro when there are so many already? why create C if we already had assembly? why create new model cars every year? why architect new homes every year? What you are proposing is we stop making changes or progress.