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

Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

omgubuntu.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 341 posts

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#301

Post by 1718627440 »

pjmlp wrote: post #300
1718627440 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Arduino,... are not GPL based Arduino is "just" repacked gcc in a nutshell, so it is GPL-based.

You need more than a compiler, so it is complicated, and not pure GPL, https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...

I was only thinking about the software, yes. Also a lot of the "Arduino" libraries are not really owned by Arduino, even if they like to attach themself to it, so while it is true what they write about different licenses of the libraries, this what not what I considered to be part of Arduino itself. I was only thinking of the buildtools they release. While these are board specific, these are often "just" a fork of gcc, board-specific linker/image builders, a flasher and the Arduino-build system. Only the latter is what they actually created (arguable not even that: https://arduinohistory.github.io/).

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#302

Post by rshackleford1 »

senfiaj wrote: post #198
erminpour wrote: post #128

Whether you like Rust or not, it's questionable as to why Canonical would push this so much and do it in such a cavalier way. Will this really make coreutils more secure? I doubt it, if anything there will be a river of new bugs. So, again, why are they pushing Rust so much? Having Microsoft make Rust a 'Tier-1' language also doesn't bode well.

>> Will this really make coreutils more secure? In the long run yes. Sure, many logic bugs happen in Rust programs as well, but memory safety bugs are another level of hell. At least many classes of exploits will mostly be impossible. Also, Rust program failures tend to be more predictable. For example, in C/C++, if you do out of bound writes in an array or writes in a freed memory block, the behavior is undefined. T…

Can you point to any outstanding, unfixable, memory safety bugs in the coreutils that justify such a rewrite? This is a cynical license issue, not a safety issue. I think there are much more severe security risks which come from behavior divergence of replacement tooling than memory safety bugs from 40 year old widely used/tested software.

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#303

Post by erminpour »

rshackleford1 wrote: post #302
senfiaj wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Will this really make coreutils more secure? In the long run yes. Sure, many logic bugs happen in Rust programs as well, but memory safety bugs are another level of hell. At least many classes of exploits will mostly be impossible. Also, Rust program failures tend to be more predictable. For example, in C/C++, if you do out of bound writes in an array or writes in a freed memory block, the behavior is undefined. T…

Can you point to any outstanding, unfixable, memory safety bugs in the coreutils that justify such a rewrite? This is a cynical license issue, not a safety issue. I think there are much more severe security risks which come from behavior divergence of replacement tooling than memory safety bugs from 40 year old widely used/tested software.

Rusty Shackelford :D

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#304

Post by collinfunk »

steveklabnik wrote: post #258
timcobb wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason for existence of uutils is ideological, not technical. which ideology? Are people saying that there's an ideology of pushing rust for things without concern for quality? Sincere question, because I'm seeing that on this thread and I wasn't aware that that was a thing beyond the "re-write it in Rust" meme.

The original authors of uutils do not particularly care about licensing, and the Rust ecosystem defaults to MIT/Apache2. So they chose that. Many people have decided that this decision supposedly specifically about licensing ideology. You can make up your mind about which of the two you believe. See also, for Ubuntu's take on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49707948

As I have told the authors privately, I find it quite difficult to take their claim that they "don't care about licensing" seriously. 13/14 of the projects under uutils are relicensing GNU or GPL'd software. The other one, shadow-rs, is totally vibe-coded, and the README mistakenly says the original shadow is GNU software under the GPL, which is neither true. If 14/14 are relicensing, or in that one case, what is thought to be relicensing, the simple explanation is that it is an explicit goal of the project.

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#305

Post by timcobb »

pessimizer wrote: post #243
timcobb wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason for existence of uutils is ideological, not technical. which ideology? Are people saying that there's an ideology of pushing rust for things without concern for quality? Sincere question, because I'm seeing that on this thread and I wasn't aware that that was a thing beyond the "re-write it in Rust" meme.

Rewrite it in anything that isn't GPL.

With the motivation of then being able to use it in closed or non-GPL products down the line?

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#306

Post by torginus »

linsomniac wrote: post #246

Beware that rust coreutils on 26.04 currently has really bad performance with larger block sizes. Ganeti uses "dd bs=1M" as part of a disc image transfer pipeline, and with 26.04 performance dropped from ~350MB/sec to 30MB/sec, with the dd command CPU-bounded. The issue seems to be that it is operating on partial buffers and then having to copy remainder of that 1M buffer around as part is consumed. Coreutils 0.11 so…

How can a command which was explicitly designed to do nothing but read and write disk become CPU bound?

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#307

Post by torginus »

pjmlp wrote: post #153
erminpour wrote: post #128

Whether you like Rust or not, it's questionable as to why Canonical would push this so much and do it in such a cavalier way. Will this really make coreutils more secure? I doubt it, if anything there will be a river of new bugs. So, again, why are they pushing Rust so much? Having Microsoft make Rust a 'Tier-1' language also doesn't bode well.

Canonical has been pushing its own agenda for ages, how many examples do you need? Microsoft making Rust tier 1 is great, it means probably one day we get a VS proper support instead of VSCode only. If you head off to Microsoft official blogs, you will find out that Microsoft already has tier 1 support for Java (ironically), Python and Go, besides the usual .NET languages and C++.

Why does 'Ubuntu defaultism' still exist in the Linux world? Them replacing packages with shitty unworkable broken snap substitutes that can break the system when updating, and have a habit of reinstalling themselves...

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#308

Post by genxy »

pessimizer wrote: post #242
geokon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's very little incentive to switch. When people release for Linux they almost always first/only test it works on Ubuntu - hence it's going to be the least buggy. (ex: GOG only seemingly tested games on Ubuntu) So the switching cost is buggy software. You'd need something radically different that brings enough new features to the table to make it worth it the switch and dealing with bad/non-existant support. I th…

[flagged]

If you still have toes, take some morphine and reload.

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#309

Post by torginus »

stouset wrote: post #62
egorfine wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason for existence of uutils is ideological, not technical. Thus code quality is of no use for the objective.

I’m a huge proponent of Rust and generally lean a lot closer to the RIIR mentality than most, but this effort seems to be such a waste of effort and resources. There have been a dozen CVEs reported against all of coreutils in the past twenty years. The most recent audit of uutils-coreutils turned up forty-four CVEs. By all appearances they’re replacing battle-tested and fundamental tooling which hasn’t been a problem…

Yes, these proclamations of Rust devs that 'the future belongs to us', aren't getting any new fans for the language. Here's my rebuttal:

YOU have proclaimed the language to be as fast as C while being safe. YOU need to prove it. Think of this as an OPPORTUNITY to PROVE that Rust can walk the walk, and you can make Rust coreutils as fast as the C one. Think hard about how you can model low level Linux constructs safely. Fix your libs. Fix the compiler. This is the yardstick you need to meet. You are making free software, and the thing about it is users are free to choose otherwise. YOU need to prove that Rust is just as fast and lightweight as C, and once you do, we'll be happy to adopt.

Right now, dear Rust devs, what you are doing is the same as AI companies are doing - you're trying to usurp power based on extremely nebulous conjured threats. Nobody likes being threatened.

Post reply on HN