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by tspiteri 1826 days ago
I love Rust, but I love and recommend ripgrep because of its usefulness, reliability and robustness, not because of the language it's written in.

I haven't looked into all the tools in that list, but I would not for example recommend exa over ls as it is simply not reliable enough: if a filename ends in a space, you won't see that in exa, and that bug has been reported for years. To me that is a clear blocker, and if it is still there, I simply cannot trust the file listing from exa, no matter how pretty it may look.

1 comments

Static linking goes a long way to making Rust worth considering when choosing tools.

Anecdote: I once had to recover a system with a corrupted libpcre.so. This will break almost every standard gnutil. The easiest way to do it without a recovery OS was to use a few alternatives written in Rust, which don't have this problem because they statically link their dependencies (and cargo still worked, so it was easy to install them).

Your anecdote is amusing, but I hope you’re not using it as an example to support your claim that Rust’s static linking should be considered when choosing tools.