In this video I discuss Ubuntu's decision to switch to using rust implementations of the core utilities (mkdir, ls, cat, etc...) and what it could mean for the broader Linux ecosystem. My merch is ...
Code written in Rust has been shown to have significantly fewer security vulnerabilities than code written in C. Distributions like Ubuntu ship a lot of security updates, so by switching to Rust-based utils, they can reduce their workload in the long run.
Outside of security you have some very really world benefits, like performance gains in various scenarios as well as lots more people willing to contribute and a much better type system (more maintainability).
Rust is better for writing multithreaded applications which means that the small amount of utilities that can utilize parallelism receive a significant speedup. uutils multithreaded sort was apparently 6x faster than the GNU utils single threaded version.
P.S. I strongly doubt handwritten assembly is more efficient than modern C compilers.
Compilers have a lot of chalenges to even compile, let alone optimize. Just register allocation alone is a big problem. An inherent problem is that the compiler does not know what the program is supposed to do. Humans still write better assembly then compilers.
The one down arrow on the guy you are responding to is from me, just so everybody knows.
The success of FOSS can in large part be attributed to copyleft licenses like the GPL. Without the protections of copyleft clauses, software just gets exploited by large corporation and end users are locked out. For just one example, if GNU software had used MIT, the entire free router movement (i.e ddwrt, openwrt and co.) would not exist today.
Is there any actual benefit ?
Code written in Rust has been shown to have significantly fewer security vulnerabilities than code written in C. Distributions like Ubuntu ship a lot of security updates, so by switching to Rust-based utils, they can reduce their workload in the long run.
There’s probably some zero day exploit someone is holding onto until everything is rust and then, bam!. Yeah, that’s just silly to think. Just silly.
Just security and hype afaik.
No, it isn’t just hype. The hype is justified.
Outside of security you have some very really world benefits, like performance gains in various scenarios as well as lots more people willing to contribute and a much better type system (more maintainability).
It’s been proven faster. That’s all I personally know.
Nothing except for binary coding can be faster than C I think.
Rust is better for writing multithreaded applications which means that the small amount of utilities that can utilize parallelism receive a significant speedup. uutils multithreaded sort was apparently 6x faster than the GNU utils single threaded version.
P.S. I strongly doubt handwritten assembly is more efficient than modern C compilers.
My simple assembly program can rum circles around compilers. As long as something is small it is possible to optimize better than a C compiler.
Compilers have a lot of chalenges to even compile, let alone optimize. Just register allocation alone is a big problem. An inherent problem is that the compiler does not know what the program is supposed to do. Humans still write better assembly then compilers.
The one down arrow on the guy you are responding to is from me, just so everybody knows.
Fortran
I’m not sure why people are downvoting you, since Fortran is known to be extremely performant when dealing with multidimensional arrays.
Well the rust project is MIT licensed, so definitely not.
I thought MIT licensing was a good thing?? What am i missing??
The success of FOSS can in large part be attributed to copyleft licenses like the GPL. Without the protections of copyleft clauses, software just gets exploited by large corporation and end users are locked out. For just one example, if GNU software had used MIT, the entire free router movement (i.e ddwrt, openwrt and co.) would not exist today.
See: Free Software Foundation, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc..