Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

As movement toward memory-safe languages, and Rust in particular, continues to grow, it is worth looking at one of the larger scale efforts to port C code that has existed for decades to Rust. The uutils project aims to rewrite all of the individual utilities included in the GNU Coreutils project in Rust. Originally created by Jordi Boggiano in 2013, the project aims to provide drop-in replacements for the Coreutils programs, adding the data-race protection and memory safety that Rust provides.

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Unlike the original C code for coreutils, updating and random PR’s to the rust version is significantly safer and easier to vet. The hardest part is, of course, getting all the OS-specific-isms right that can’t really be expressed by better code unless you are very strict on a type-based programming (which I’m unsure if they are for this, at least you can to type-based programming in Rust unlike C so if not now then could be done in the future).

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