Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 22:41 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by khim
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

> Sure. But only our descendants will be able to tell. When was TiVo made? 22 years ago? That's almost quarter-century. The promised doom haven't materialized yet.

On the contrary; it's come to pass many times over, now affecting the overwhelming majority of computing devices sold.

Oh, and heavy equipment. Farmers shouldn't have to commit felonies just to get their equipment working again:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7m8mx/john-deere-promise...

to post comments

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 22:58 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

> On the contrary; it's come to pass many times over, now affecting the overwhelming majority of computing devices sold.

I think you are mixing two very tangentially related issues:

Tivoisation/lockdown — which predates FSF and GNU and is wasn't ever a problem in BSD wars.
Balcanization — creation of incompatible software platforms which makes life of software developers miserable

Lockdown is happening, of course, as I have said it was a thing half-century ago and even before. Industry always wanted that, that's why we have these fancy screwdriver bits, e.g.

But balcanization… not sure where one can see it today. What makes all these numerous proprietary works of LLVM any different from proprietary forks of GCC which were supplied (and still are supplied) in various projects? Yes, technically speaking I can look on the code of TI-GCC or GPC and try to backport fixes from GCC12… but practically speaking it wouldn't much easier than attempting to replicate work embedded in these LLVM forks.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 28, 2021 14:01 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

Surely the biggest difference is that vendors of LLVM forks don't have to give you the source code to the forks?