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by HackerThemAll 499 days ago
"Rust offers several advantages over C/C++, particularly in terms of memory safety, concurrency, and performance."

Coreutils have been written in plain C.

Rust offer several advantages over C and C with classes from '90s, which is known in some circles as C++.

Modern C++ standards offer excellent memory safety, which is not too far from Rust's. Especially since we have smart pointers, move semantics, and great STL containers, it can be used securely.

C and C++ have always offered best performance. Coreutils performance was and is great, with the caveat described below.

C and C++ were always able to offer concurrency, but that was not easy. Rust excels here, especially with async/await. Majority of Coreutils programs are not multithreaded.

Were Coreutils written in modern C++, they would have had no need to rewrite to Rust. It is reluctance (or inability) to use modern C++ in these projects responsible for bugs and security issues.

The size of produced binaries is smallest with C. And it sometimes matters a lot.