from Hacker News

Ubuntu moving to Rust: Carefully but Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu

by mvip on 3/12/25, 3:49 PM with 5 comments

• by aragilar on 3/13/25, 7:09 AM

  It's good they know they need to be cautious about it (a year seems a bit optimistic though), but "haven’t had many issues" kinda sounds concerning if it means I cannot boot (or given sudo-rs lacks sudoedit currently, locking me out the system)...

  https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-ox... seems to have more discussions asking why they're not using existing infrastructure to manage the transition.

• by sightbroke on 3/12/25, 4:19 PM

  Pardon my ignorance and I understand the appeal of keeping everything within one cohesive language, but are some of the these core utilities really being made "safer" by rewriting them in rust?

  I mean, is 'cp' really unsafe in C and will be magically safe in Rust?

  Or is this partly to appeal to the comfort of having one uniform language?

  Admittedly in the long term regardless these rewrites may well pay off quite well.