The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
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@lcamtuf Not only that, some of the utils were not command line-compatible with their non-Rust counterparts.
Honestly, I don't understand why these utils were rewritten. They didn't need rewriting.
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@sten @darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf is it really production if it's not on my machine ?
@m33
I discovered at Google a tremendous laziness and lack of rigor because "well if it doesn't work or has problems we can roll it back." I came to think of it as The Google Principle and it can be more easily written as:The amount of care and thought that goes into a software change is proportional to the perceived difficulty of pushing that change into production.
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@lcamtuf Not only that, some of the utils were not command line-compatible with their non-Rust counterparts.
Honestly, I don't understand why these utils were rewritten. They didn't need rewriting.
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@lcamtuf a related observation would probably be: why did important, security-critical edge cases get handled without enough documentation to prevent them from reoccurring?
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@lcamtuf There's also that human habit of getting complacent about all bugs when _some_ types of bugs are either impossible or very very hard to make because of language structure and tooling.
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
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@sten @darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf is it really production if it's not on my machine ?
@m33 @darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf An excellent point that I have to admit I hadn't considered.
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
-
The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
@lcamtuf I always looked at this project as a sort of hobby, a learning exercise, maybe just a lark, or a "maybe one day we'll have a useful alternative"...and then Canonical went and adopted it before anyone could reasonably believe it was of production quality
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
It’s frustrating that POSIX took decades to get APIs that weren’t intrinsically racy, but then higher-level languages that post dated the improved ones implemented equivalents of the old racy APIs. C++ was annoying, they waited until pretty much every platform that supported C++ and had a filesystem implemented the newer APIs and then standardised the filesystem TS with racy ones. I believe Rust is similar, but at least it has cap-std which implements the non-racy versions as an alternative standard library.
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@sten @lcamtuf sorry, it's been literally years since the last time I cared enough about this, so I don't have the links at hand. From what I remember, the dev(s) that got the project started claimed to not care about the license and that they would consider relicensing if the community showed an interest, but shot down all proposals to switch to GPL with no discussion.
Officially t's explicitly NOT about that:
«It is not primarily […] about license debates.»
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
@lcamtuf It's even sillier because the Rust rewrite was just someones hobby project to learn Rust, it wasn't engineered from the start to be the "Canonical" implementation, so picking it off the Internet and shoving it into Ubuntu is an engineering decision that the professional Ubuntu engineers should be accountable for, not the original developer who just shared their work with the world.
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@darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf Sure, but perhaps don't do your learning in production?
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@lcamtuf Yeah, but they got to license-wash the coreutils, the gnu coreutils are GPL3, the rust uutils use the much more corporate-overlord and user-abuse friendly MIT license.
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@lcamtuf See this all the time - people storm in trying to change things before trying to understand how the current things work. People who don't learn from what's been done before. Society doesn't progress from efforts like theirs. You only make progress by learning from and building on top of what came before.
