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Comment by greatgib

14 days ago

The rewrite in Rust is mostly vanity and marketing but not based on a real technical need...

So I don't see why they would want to do that.

Canonical's usage of uutils is likely for marketing. But the codebase itself was developed for fun, as an excuse for people to have a hands-on way to learn Rust back before Rust was even released, with a minor justification as being cross-platform. From the original README in 2013:

Why?

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Many GNU, linux and other utils are pretty awesome, and obviously some effort has been spent in the past to port them to windows. However those projects are either old, abandonned, hosted on CVS, written in platform-specific C, etc.

Rust provides a good platform-agnostic way of writing systems utils that are easy to compile anywhere, and this is as good a way as any to try and learn it.

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/9653ed81a2fbf393f42...

  • Isn't this how Kernighan and late Ritchie (K&R) ended up with unix and C?

    Honestly, brilliant guys.

    When C got its own standards committee they even rejected Ritchie's proposal to add fat pointers to C before it was too late to add them. Instead, we got the C abstract machine.

I thought it was a learning exercise, and maybe some corporations also like it because it has more permissive licensing.