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It seems Linux Mint is dropping GNU coreutils in favor of rust-coreutils following Ubuntu. (blog.linuxmint.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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Clem talks about that in the comments. What are some no hassle, Debian based, rustless distros as alternative to Mint?

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[–] 27 points 5 months ago (11 children)

Is this bad? I'm afraid I don't have a good grasp on what the implications are of this.

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  • [+] 37 points 5 months ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)
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  • [–] 18 points 5 months ago

    They probably work a bit faster than the originals

    There are some commands doing string processing that have been rewritten to use SIMD instructions which makes them inherently faster. On the other hand there are other commands where they're performing worse than GNU coreutils: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Rust-Coreutils-Perf

    Over time they will probably close the performance gap for those outliers, but if the GNU coreutils maintainers wanted to accelerate the same commands with SIMD instructions they could also do that. There's no real reason why long-term one should be faster than the other, except for whichever project gets more attention from maintainers.

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  • [–] 21 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    They're only MIT licensed and not GPL so in that sense yeah

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Rust-coreutils may eventually become a suitable replacement for coreutils but it hasn't yet existed for long enough to iron out all the bugs and there's no real advantage to using it right now.

    The idea is that Rust will make everything easier to maintain and improve in the long run, or something like that. It's somewhat plausible, but it's not totally obvious whether that will prove correct. So it's easy to suspect that there must be some other unstated motivations behind it, although to me there don't appear to be any in view.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    I think with things like this that are so foundational and far-reaching, there's a point where you kind of just have to decide that the new thing is good enough and be ready for the rough parts of the transition.

    Time is definitely a huge component of making a robust piece of software, but I think user diversity is also really important, and a project is going to hit a plateau of features and stability without wider adoption (even if it's meant as a replacement for an existing thing) because the people working on it just don't know about certain edge cases and don't know to look for them.

    That's not me saying we should be migrating libraries and software just because someone remade them in a new language, but from what I know of Rust, it really does sound like a safer and and more approachable language than C++ and especially C.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Ubuntu wanted to fully switch to rust for 26.04 but they weren’t fully ready yet so some are still Classic(?)

    Whenever you’re replacing something tried and true it needs to be at least as good as the original. Too many bugs or missing features and all hell will break loose.

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