I find it interesting how people will criticise Rust for not preventing all bugs, when the alternative languages don't prevent those same bugs nor the bugs rust does catch. If you're comparing Rust to a perfect language that doesn't exist, you should probably also compare your alternative to that perfect language as well right?

I'd be interested in a comparison with the amount of bugs and CVE's in GNU coreutils at the start of its lifetime, and compare it with this rewrite. Same with the number of memory bugs that are impossible in (safe) Rust.

Don't just downvote me, tell me how I'm wrong.

▲

flohofwoe 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What's the point of a "rewrite in Rust" when it introduces bugs that either never existed in the original or were fixed already?

> I'd be interested in a comparison with the amount of bugs and CVE's in GNU coreutils at the start of its lifetime

The point is, those bugs had been discovered and fixed decades ago. Do you want to wait decades for coreutils_rs to reach the same robustness? Why do a rewrite when the alternative is to help improve the original which is starting from a much more solid base?

And even when a complete rewrite would make sense, why not do a careful line-by-line porting of the original code instead of doing a clean-room implementation to at least carry over the bugfixes from the original? And why even use the Rust stdlib at all when it contains footguns that are not acceptable for security-critical code?

	▲	slopinthebag an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Idk, you should ask the maintainers these questions, or the Ubuntu maintainers. I'm not particularly arguing in favour of this rewrite, but the title and contents of the post are talking about Rust in general and the type of bugs it can/can't prevent. Perhaps one good reason is that once the initial bugs are fixed, over time the number of security issues will be lower than the original? If it could reach the same level of stability and robustness in months or a small number of years, the downsides aren't totally obvious. We will have to wait to judge I suppose. Maybe it's not worth it and that's fine, but it doesn't speak to Rust as a language.

▲

throawayonthe 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i don't think CVEs were a thing at the start of the GNU rewrite

▲

kubb an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You’re right, but it’s gonna be hard to stop them from raging. In many ways people want to be justified in a „see, I told you so, Rust is useless” belief, and they’re willing to take one or two questionable logical steps to get there.