Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 498 posts

Re: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

#31

Post by hyperbovine »

gjem97 wrote: post #14
masklinn wrote: post #4

Rewriting coreutils is neat, but a project I'd really look forward would be a strict POSIX base expanded with warnings or errors on valid but risky constructs e.g. echo -n. Even more so if it included a shell (with static analysis of useless uses and dangerous patterns). That would make writing cross-shell scripts much easier.

Ok, I'll bite. What's wrong with "echo -n"?

On some Unix variants that will print "-n" followed by a newline. On others it will print the empty string. http://steve-parker.org/sh/echo.shtml

Re: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

#32

Post by webscalist »

gravypod wrote: post #21

I'd really love to use rust, given the large growth of projects like this. I only need an IDE to get started, but it seems like there isn't one yet. Anyone have any pointers on where I can find a good IDE for Rust? Should I just start praying to lord-JetBrains for something that works?

https://areweideyet.com/

vscode and textadept are good

Re: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

#33

Post by BuckRogers »

pjc50 wrote: post #5

The rationale talks about easy portability to Windows, but I'm skeptical - the underlying API and filesystem is different enough that this is likely to cause problems. '\' vs '/' to start with.

I write a lot of single source Windows/OSX/Linux utilities and the nice thing about Windows is that back and forward slashes are interchangeable so you can just write for POSIX.

Re: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

#34

Post by steveklabnik »

z3phyr wrote: post #19

Rust is a fine language, no doubt. What worries me is the exact rewrite of the C code using the unsafe construct. Also a little out of topic; Can more light be shed by fellow HNers on the debugging tools for rust, the debugging experiences from the security research point of view?

It looks like there are 134 instances of 'unsafe', in 23,000 lines of Rust. And it looks like a lot of that unsafe is to FFI into libc.

Rust works with GDB, so you end up debugging like anything else. IDE integration is being actively worked on, and sorta-kinda works in my understanding.

Re: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

#35

Post by cballard »

theonewolf wrote: post #24
gravypod wrote: post #21

I'd really love to use rust, given the large growth of projects like this. I only need an IDE to get started, but it seems like there isn't one yet. Anyone have any pointers on where I can find a good IDE for Rust? Should I just start praying to lord-JetBrains for something that works?

I don't understand why you need an IDE, I believe Rust is simple enough that you can work on things in Notepad++ or Vim or Emacs.

I tried to use Rust briefly but found that discovery was very difficult without autocomplete - I'm used to Swift's SourceKit, which is quite good if it hasn't crashed.

Re: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

#36

Post by masklinn »

gjem97 wrote: post #14
masklinn wrote: post #4

Rewriting coreutils is neat, but a project I'd really look forward would be a strict POSIX base expanded with warnings or errors on valid but risky constructs e.g. echo -n. Even more so if it included a shell (with static analysis of useless uses and dangerous patterns). That would make writing cross-shell scripts much easier.

Ok, I'll bite. What's wrong with "echo -n"?

http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/echo+printf/ is the raw data version.

POSIX defines echo as only taking string parameters and no options, but notes that behaviour facing `-n` is implementation-defined.

BSD and GNU echo implement `echo -n` as not printing a trailing newline, but `echo` commonly calls to a shell builtin which may or may not follow that behaviour (and may switch behaviour depending on whether the shell is in "sh mode" or not), so `echo -n` could print `-n` or nothing whatsoever (empty string and suppressed newline) depending on the utils set, the shell, and the shell's runmode.

GNU echo also supports -e, -E, --version and --help options, and much like -n shells and other utils set may or may not support these.

For instance on my machine (OSX 10.11)

* zsh (builtin) interprets -e, -E and -n as options (but not version or help)

* bash (builtin) also does, except when invoked as sh in which case it does not and all parameters are literal (this may also apply to zsh)

* dash (builtin) interprets -n, but none of the others. bash note may also apply to it.

* BSD echo interprets -n but will print -e, -E, version and help literally

* GNU echo interprets all of the above

So if you use echo with any non-literal parameter, or with one of the parameters listed above, in a script you distribute to un-controlled third-parties as an sh script (rather than e.g. a bash or zsh script specifically) you will suffer from portability issues.

And that's just for measly trivial echo (and incidentally why you should always use printf rather than echo in scripts you try to make portable).

Re: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

#37

Post by niccaluim »

gravypod wrote: post #21

I'd really love to use rust, given the large growth of projects like this. I only need an IDE to get started, but it seems like there isn't one yet. Anyone have any pointers on where I can find a good IDE for Rust? Should I just start praying to lord-JetBrains for something that works?

If you've never programmed without an IDE I strongly encourage you to give it a go. You'll learn a lot!

[Good lord, a downvote on this? I'm being completely sincere.]

Re: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

#38

Post by 2Xheadpalm »

Someone1234 wrote: post #9
pjc50 wrote: post #5

The rationale talks about easy portability to Windows, but I'm skeptical - the underlying API and filesystem is different enough that this is likely to cause problems. '\' vs '/' to start with.

Windows supports forward-slash fine. Has for at least 25 years. No need to change / to \ or visa versa. Now obviously any Windows port would have to call Win32 APIs instead of POSIX APIs (unless you're writing for a Cygwin-like layer).

Supported, just but it's a second class citizen, for example, no tab completion of directories on the cmd prompt when using forward slash. Some commands will not except it;

e.g. type c:\home\foo.txt -> cats it out type c:/home/foo.txt -> 'The syntax of this command is incorrect.'

whereas cd will except either forward or backslash

cd c:\home/foo cd c:/home/foo

work as expected.

Re: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

#39

Post by masklinn »

thegeomaster wrote: post #12
ignoramous wrote: post #8

Rust is a great choice for systems programming it'd seem. Esp considering that a well-tested, battle-hardened code-base like SQLite faces problems [1] solely due to the nature of the language its written in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312918

Not sure why you're being downvoted. I don't see why we shouldn't be moving to languages like Rust given the chance, as C makes it far more difficult to write safe and correct code.

I expect it's because because the first part is essentially preaching to the choir, and because Richard Hipp very much disagrees with the second part[0]

> Rewriting SQLite in Rust, or some other trendy “safe” language, would not help. In fact it might hurt.

(see link for expansion on that matter, which is a question of tooling and testing)

[0] http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1292#comment-18452

Re: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

#40

Post by coldtea »

masklinn wrote: post #4

Rewriting coreutils is neat, but a project I'd really look forward would be a strict POSIX base expanded with warnings or errors on valid but risky constructs e.g. echo -n. Even more so if it included a shell (with static analysis of useless uses and dangerous patterns). That would make writing cross-shell scripts much easier.

What exactly is this thing with 3 people commenting "I'll bite"?

How is that the most obvious response to parent's observation about echo?

Post reply on HN