3 ms·
Rewriting perfectly good code was a colossal mistake.
by gblargg 6mo ago
Rewriting perfectly good code was a colossal mistake.
- Cthulhu_ 6mo agoNot necessarily, but was the reasoning sound and have the tradeoffs been made? The website (https://uutils.github.io/ https://uutils.github.io/) shows some reasonable "why"s (although I disagree with making "Rust is more appealing" a compelling reason, but that's just me (disclaimer: I don't like C and don't know Rust so take this comment as you will)), but I think what's missing is how they will ensure both compatibility and security / edge case handling, which requires deep knowledge and experience in the original code and "tribal knowledge" of deep *nix internals.
- dwattttt 6mo agoI do wonder whether people got down the article enough to see the list of bugs patched in GNU coreutils. That "perfectly good code" that it sounds like no one should question included "split --line-bytes has a user controlled heap buffer overflow".
- gblargg 6mo agoYes, perfectly good code can have bugs. This is ridiculous thinking to scrap a codebase because it's not bug-free, to replace it with one riddled with differences in behavior that break everything that uses it.
- kibwen 6mo agoThe irony here being that GNU's coreutils themselves originated as rewrites, from back when BSD's copyright status was still legally unclear.
- gblargg 6mo agoUnderstandable as GNU was founded on software freedom. I guess one could argue that the Rust rewrite is to establish some kind of higher standard for correctness.