Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 19:33 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by eru
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

I disagree mildly. It's vital that a replacement for something important like coreutils be 100% compatible, but that should be limited to doing the same things when given commands that are valid for the old version. They should be free to add new features as long as they are only accessed in a way that wouldn't happen with the old software, e.g. by using currently unused command line switches. But new features should take a back seat to getting compatibility complete.

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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 11, 2021 9:42 UTC (Fri) by james (guest, #1325) [Link]

I disagree mildly.

So do I!

It's vital that a replacement for something important like coreutils be 100% compatible...

Not that coreutils was ever 100% compatible unless POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. I see no reason why a reimplementation shouldn't be afforded the same luxury (GNULY_CORRECT?) if they identified unfortunate edge behaviour.

Having said that, the original Unix utilities were written by competent hackers. The GNU reimplementations were also written by competent hackers. There can't be many places where existing behaviour could be improved, but not in a backwards-compatible way, and where the compatibility break would be worth it.