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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Has Anyone Attempted Replacing All Linux Command Line Tools with Rust Alternatives? Share Your Experience! (reddthat.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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After watching this video, I'm tempted to give it a try myself. The idea of swapping out traditional CLI tools for Rust-based alternatives is intriguing, and I'm curious to know if anyone has undertaken such an endeavor.

I'm also on the lookout for dotfiles that primarily feature configurations for Rust tools. I find it both educational and entertaining to explore other people's configurations. I stumbled upon this repository, but I'm interested in discovering more if possible.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Some have better ux, some support more platforms out of the box. I don't find it a good idea trying to replace everything though.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I only tend to replace if all of those are met:

there are neat additional features or a performance gain that's noticeable in regular use
there is some maintenance history
It doesn't completely break my workflow.

So far, only things I've actually replaced are aliasing ls to exa/eza, and switched to ripgrep for most of my uses of grep.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

coreutils-hybrid (UUTILS for Arch Linux)
UUTILS Site & Index

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Looks neat, but again, 99% of those utils I've never ever thought "this shit too slow" or "UX sucks". Replacing for the sake of replacing I'm not too keen on.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

They also have the benefit of being in a memory safe language and being cross-platform. Rust does actually have some advantages when it comes to making secure & stable tooling.
This aims to be a drop-in replacement for GNU coreutils and might actually serve to increase security, stability, & speed across the system as a ton of stuff rely on coreutils.
Now it's still not complete, so you can't just replace everything but I've actually noticed an improvement in my system with hybrid.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I know, but coreutils also literally never broke on me as they are. To me, the whole point of coreutils is that they're just... there. I'll leave the decision to change bundled tooling to distro maintainers.

I'll also be perfectly honest: from a developer standpoint, end-users caring about the language a tool was developed with is, in the end, a pretty weird concept to me. Memory safety and cross platform compilation is DX stuff. Nothing tells you as a user that the thing you're using isn't sprinkling unsafe everywhere, in the end... The application itself doing what it advertises is what I'd expect most users to care about. Especially for stuff as old and relatively stable as most coreutils.

Ah, except Electron. Fuck most Electron apps.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

If you go to the uutils repo you can see that it's making proper use of fuzzing, test, etc. and only makes use of unsafe in necessary areas. Uutils is also more consistent with modern standards thanks to clap & uniform design, has out of the box selinux support, etc.

The unsafe keyword isn't inherently "unsafe", nore does it disable any checks contrary to what some believe.

if you use a reference in unsafe code, it will still be checked.

Also many distros are already packaging uutils do to it "growing into remarkably robust shape", it's just not ready to completely replace coreutils quite yet and so it's not up for consideration by distros to ditch coreutils until it's at least at parity. (That's why I make use of hybrid and not outright replacing everything).

The point is not the language, it's how the project is making use of the language and uutils is doing a lot right.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

My point was intended to be more generic than just uutils though. Agreed that this specific project looks interesting.

And yes, I know the unsafe keyword is not inherently unsafe to use, but it's also, in practice, one of the few potential footguns of the language, and is easy to abuse and get wrong. It'll raise a few eyebrows in PRs and you'll be expected to have both good reasons and a good test coverage at the very minimum lol. It's a good red flag, if you do end up with runtime memory issues, that it's probably happening in that block, but past this, you're still basically foregoing some safety for convenience. And people fail. Often.