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From the README: Why? Many GNU, Linux and other utils are pretty awesome, and obviously some effort has been spent in the past to port them to Windows. Howeve
by paulrouget 12y ago
From the README:
Why?
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, abandoned, 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.
- XorNot 12y agoPorting the core utils was never a language problem - it's always been a "the terminal works pretty fundamentally differently on Windows" problem.
- pdw 12y agoThe file system and security model differences are much more important than any terminal differences. Looking through the programs included in coreutils, I can see only two or three that care about the terminal at all (`stty`, `nohup`, ls output coloring).
- TorKlingberg 12y agoI think "terminal" here also includes differences in the shell. For example if you type "command *", a Unix shell will expand the star before calling the command. On Windows the star is passed to the command.
- pjc50 12y agoCygwin does a very good job of letting you use UNIX utils on windows. But because it's hosted on CVS, that makes it uncool and worthy of a rewrite? I've nothing against rewriting coreutils in Rust as part of a project to produce a "Rust operating system" in the same way that UNIX is the "C operating system". I do find "project rejected due to not on github" to be silly and a slightly unpleasant trend.
- asveikau 12y agoI don't know how the rust runtime or this project achieves portability, but I don't think cygwin is a great example. It might appear to work well on the surface but it is a heavy layer, which comes at performance cost and is somewhat inelegant. Maybe cygwin is OK if you are fine with the costs and want to maximize the amount of Unix-like functionality (and you don't hit the bugs - I have seen some very nasty ones in the cygwin dll - deadlocks, random crashes). But something like MinGW/msys does a much better job of compiling for Windows.
- fithisux 12y agoLet me rephrase it more accurately "Cygwin does a very good job of trashing your HD on windows." It cost me 90 euros for two hard drives.
- pjc50 12y agoHow on earth did it manage to do that? Two drives? Not recoverable by formatting? I didn't think it even installed in the driver layer.