Seems pretty impressive they rewrote the coreutils in a new language, with so little Unix experience, and managed to do such a good job with very little bugs or vulns. I would have expected an order of magnitude more at least.

Shows how good Rust is, that even inexperienced Unix devs can write stuff like this and make almost no mistakes.

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nine_k 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, it's the lack of Unix experience that's terrifying. So many of mistakes listed are rookie mistakes, like not propagating the most severe errors, or the `kill -1` thing. Why were people who apparently did not have much experience using coreutils assigned to rewrite coreutils?

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aw1621107 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Why were people who apparently did not have much experience using coreutils assigned to rewrite coreutils?

From what I understand, "assigned" probably isn't the best way to put it. uutils started off back in 2013 as a way to learn Rust [0] way before the present kerfuffle.

[0]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/tree/9653ed81a2fbf393f42...

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nineteen999 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah perhaps learning UNIX API's and Rust at the same time doesn't lead to a drop in replacement ready to be shipped in major distributions. Who whould have thunk it.

	▲	aw1621107 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Strictly speaking it doesn't preclude eventually producing a production-ready drop-in replacement either, though evidently that needs a fresh set of eyes.

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bpbp-mango 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

exactly this. I wrote one of them back then as a learning experience. some of the code I wrote is still intact, incredibly.

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JuniperMesos 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why is it even possible to represent a negative PID, let alone treat the integer -1 as a PID meaning "all effective processes"? This seems like a mistake (if not a rookie mistake) in the Linux kernel API itself.

	▲	nine_k 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		-1 is a special case, a way to represent a PID with all bits set in a platform-independent way. It's not very clean, and it comes from ancient times when writing some extra code and storing an extra few bytes was way more expensive.
	▲	dminik 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It feels a bit like a "better is better" language hitting all of the quirks of a "worse is better" environment.
	▲	antonvs 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Pretty much all the rough edges being discussed here are design mistakes in Linux or Unix, and/or a consequence of using an unsafe language with limited abstractions and a weak type system. But because of ubiquity, this is everyone’s problem now.

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gblargg 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Rewriting perfectly good code was a colossal mistake.

	▲	Cthulhu_ 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not necessarily, but was the reasoning sound and have the tradeoffs been made? The website (https://uutils.github.io/) shows some reasonable "why"s (although I disagree with making "Rust is more appealing" a compelling reason, but that's just me (disclaimer: I don't like C and don't know Rust so take this comment as you will)), but I think what's missing is how they will ensure both compatibility and security / edge case handling, which requires deep knowledge and experience in the original code and "tribal knowledge" of deep *nix internals.

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twhitmore 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]