Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust
Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust
Posted Jun 11, 2021 9:42 UTC (Fri) by james (guest, #1325)In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by rgmoore
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust
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.