[nottorp]

Before the current "AI" hysteria, HN was full of "I've rewritten this thing that was working just fine in Rust". No mention of how it's better, has more features - or even has all the original's features - or anything about why you should use the rewrite instead of the original.

Am I supposed to use a tool just because of what it's made of, or because it solves a problem for me?

[pdimitar]

> No mention of how it's better

No embarrassing buffer overflow CVEs is a very good start.

To me that's an actual selling point and I've migrated from almost all UNIX coreutils to Rust alternatives for that reason alone.

> Am I supposed to use a tool just because of what it's made of, or because it solves a problem for me?

No, as an adult you are supposed to not frame the discussion unfairly and ask the right questions.

[nottorp]

The right questions according to who?

Are your coreutils replacements 100% drop-in?

[pdimitar]

I don't need a 100% drop-in. Barely anyone does. I've observed at least 80% of all of the coreutils features are not used by 90% - 99% of programmers and sysadmins.

Ask people if they used all flags of `sort` and report back results as a test of my hypothesis.

> The right questions according to who?

This is tiring. I told you twice that I'd prefer you engaging in technical merits. You keep drawing attention to what is annoying you but you'll have to talk to your friends and family about that because I am not interested.

Bye.

[AnimalMuppet]

I don't see many CVEs in coreutils. Maybe one or two, in several decades? I do on occasion use obscure flags (or at least ones that are obscure to me).

> This is tiring.

Hey, you're the one keeping the argument going...

[pdimitar]

One more person misinterpreting? Cool.

I am getting tired of being misinterpreted, not of the argument itself because the argument ended several comments ago and the person focused on being a little rebel ("who gets the determine the right questions" is his favorite pet peeve apparently).

There is no argument currently, just people trying really hard to miss the point that was stated very clearly.

[AnimalMuppet]

Yeah... I'll just leave the other readers (if anyone else is still reading) to judge whether we missed your point, or you missed ours...

(Or, I suppose, whether we're just talking past each other.)

[nottorp]

But the only "technical merit" seems to be "omg it's more secure". I've literally never seen any other argument in favor of Rust.

[l33t7332273]

Is security not a technical merit?

[jstimpfle]

It is but there are other technical and non-technical merits too. "Security" doesn't trump all. If you need secure, turn off your computer.

I tried Rust and downloaded some projects that should be comparatively simple (e.g. text editor). "cargo build" downloaded and built about 500 dependencies. The Rust ecosystem had a chance to convince me, and it sure has some convincing results. But it wasn't my cup of tea.

If you included hundreds of dependencies to do what you can't easily do yourself within the "safe" framework, that may or may not be the language's or the ecosystem's failure. But the attribute "secure" for such a project is questionable. As NPM history or a certain guy or the recent events around the xz project illustrate well.