Show HN: RustyBox – a Busybox fork written in Rust

Seems to consist mostly of a copy of Busybox’s C code auto-translated to Rust using c2rust – resulting in ubiquitous use of raw pointers and `unsafe` for mundane operations. That’s technically “written entirely in Rust”, but not in the way you’d expect… On the other hand, it could serve as a good starting point for a gradual rewrite into idiomatic Rust.

Is C2R (and the precursor I know of F2C) strictly speaking "without a line of C" in it?

Yes, literally. But figuratively, No, because you used the C as a higher order definition language and did translation not re-implementation.

So this might (in some cases) be bug for bug compatible (a good thing?) if the bug is a logic bug, not a C boundary error or a type cast effect or something not strictly defined. It isn't an "independently implemented suite" if you wanted to e.g. use it for conformance testing to a spec.

Two of the bullet points they list ask for help in doing this conversion:

* Replace some extern "C" includes with more idiomatic uses. Pretty straightforward find/replace-all usually does the trick. * Pick a utility, like cat or touch, and work on translating it into safer, more idiomatic rust. There are plenty of unsafes lying around that you can tackle!

Oh no, it seems to just be c2rust. I wish they actually meant "written" as in "written" and not as in "compiled".

I've always been interested in busybox and other similar tool sets - I even wrote a very simple set of coreutils clones at one point; but I've never really understood the use case. I like Rust & I like using modern tools when there's a benefit. But whatever coreutils Apple ship or come with a reasonable Linux distro seem to work 99% of the time for my work. Simpler & smaller I get for restricted embedded, I'm sure I've used them doing embedded work with small ARM boards & a custom tiny Linux - but the payoffs have never seemed too enticing.