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by ploxiln 2150 days ago
One example: librsvg was rewritten from C into Rust, gradually, while retaining the C API:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/librsvg https://people.gnome.org/~federico/news-2016-10.html

(I do not necessarily endorse this, as I find the dependency on a Rust compiler of very recent vintage, to be much more annoying than depending on any decent C compiler from the last 7 years or so.)

1 comments

But the vastly many more users don't need that compiler right? If you merely write a program to render SVG you don't care, your program just got safer "magically" ? If you run such a program you aren't even aware anything happened, the updated version is apparently safer.
Except for all the corner cases that were covered by the original and are not by the rewrite.
The librsvg author doesn't list any such corner cases.

Perhaps you can list some and why they were casualties of the Rust language rather than reasonable cleanup that would have happened in any rewrite?