[oncallthrow]

"rewrite it in rust" gets a lot of hate, but generally the people rewriting things in Rust actually give a shit, which tends to pay dividends. I say this as someone who doesn't use Rust and doesn't particularly like it or its community.

[hnlmorg]

People who wrote the coreutils give a shit too.

The reason “rewrite in Rust” gets a lot of hate is because it’s often a poorer replica in that it supports a subset of features and sometimes so littered with unsafe blocks that it’s barely any safer than their C counterparts.

Ripgrep and bat are the exceptions in that they’re modernisations in every sense of the term. They’re safer, have more modern features, and better defaults. Even if you don’t give a crap about memory safety, there’s a reason to use ripgrep and bat.

Personally I really don’t see the benefit in rewriting stuff unless you’re bringing other modernisations to the table too. But I suspect for some people, it’s more of an exercise to learn Rust than it is an ambition to displace a particular coreutil.

[sureglymop]

I have no issue with rewriting the coreutils in rust technically but I also don't think it's that interesting. They work just fine as they are.

However what I truly don't understand is using a different license. For something so fundamental, please just let that be the same.

But I think there are a lot more great examples. I have used pandas and I like polars. I have used latex but I like typst. People are creating generally valuable tools that bring something new to the table. More competition and diversity is rarely a bad thing.

[hnlmorg]

What license would that be? GPLv3 for GNU? GPLv2 for busybox? Or BSD for Toybox (Android)

Or BSD/ISC for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS etc coreutils? All of which also have subtly different implementations from each other.

Or maybe you are talking about other UNIXs like CDDL for OpenSolaris?

Or perhaps you meant a proprietary license like Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64 UNIX and so on?

Or maybe we just agree that there isn’t a standard license for coreutils and developers should be free to chose to license their own code however they wish?

[DaSHacka]

I think the obvious answer is whatever tool you're attempting to replicate/supplant, you should use the same (or a compatible) license.

The issue is there's a massive leap between GPLv3 and MIT, even something like GPLv2 or anything else is better than MIT or public domain-tier licenses.

[burntsushi]

> I think the obvious answer is whatever tool you're attempting to replicate/supplant, you should use the same (or a compatible) license.

Is this really obvious? Did GNU coreutils do this for the project it was attempting to replicate/supplant?

> even something like GPLv2 or anything else is better than MIT or public domain-tier licenses

That's an opinion, not a fact.

[DaSHacka]

> That's an opinion, not a fact.

Except on average, how often do GPL projects get forked and modified without the changes getting released to the public versus with MIT projects? Which one benefits end users more?

[hnlmorg]

> I think the obvious answer is whatever tool you're attempting to replicate/supplant, you should use the same (or a compatible) license.

But there isn’t a standard license for coreutils, as I’ve demonstrated.

And worse to your point is that literally only one implementation of coreutils is GPLv3. So by your logic “rewrite in rust” projects shouldnt be GPL-licensed.

> The issue is there's a massive leap between GPLv3 and MIT, even something like GPLv2 or anything else is better than MIT or public domain-tier licenses.

Actually MIT is closer to what the term “public domain” means than GPLv3 is.

But either way, you’re arguing preference as fact. And your preference here is basically just a license flame war. I thought the community had evolved passed this pettiness.

[DaSHacka]

> But there isn’t a standard license for coreutils, as I’ve demonstrated.

There is for the specific coreutils they're attempting to replicate the behavior of though. They're directly targeting the GNU coreutils.

> Actually MIT is closer to what the term “public domain” means than GPLv3 is.

Yeah, that's the problem with it.

> But either way, you’re arguing preference as fact. And your preference here is basically just a license flame war. I thought the community had evolved passed this pettiness.

Is it really pettiness if one license allows for Elasticsearch situations and the other keeps the software and its derivatives free for people to use? Go and try to argue that the Linux kernel should be relicensed as MIT, surely the license doesn't matter at all and had no impact whatsoever on how things got to the point they are now. It's just pettiness, right?

[steveklabnik]

MIT/Apache2 is the default in the Rust ecosystem, and so the authors selected it because they didn’t care that much, and so going with the community default makes sense.

In practice, even if they’d chosen the GPL for their own code, they’d be including dependencies that weren’t GPL’d, so unless they were committing to doing everything from scratch (including the Rust standard library!) some parts of the codebase would be non-GPL’d.

[em-bee]

so unless they were committing to doing everything from scratch (including the Rust standard library!) some parts of the codebase would be non-GPL’d.

that doesn't matter. the point of the GPL is to protect the application. that still happens even if libraries used are not GPL. the LGPL would not exist if that were an issue, so using a different more restrictive license for applications, and a less restrictive one for libraries is done intentionally.

[DaSHacka]

> MIT/Apache2 is the default in the Rust ecosystem, and so the authors selected it because they didn’t care that much, and so going with the community default makes sense.

This is exactly the issue most of us have with the rust ecosystem and these 'rewrite in rust' projects, though.

By making everything licensed with the absolute bottom wrung restrictions, you're just made it even easier for corpos to have free pickings of any given tool on the internet to incorporate into their own tools and have never-ending Amazon and Elasticsearch situations.

Obviously the community wouldn't even be here to begin with if it wasn't for Linux going with a GPLv2 license. Going forward, with everything becoming more MIT/BSD licensed, I wonder to see how the community/ecosystem will fare.

I suspect, should there come a time in the future where we realize that this may have been a critical error, it'll be far too late to correct it.

[steveklabnik]

I disagree but I understand your perspective, and that's fine. I mostly wanted to communicate "the choice of license was mostly out of needing to just pick one, it was not ideologically motivated."

[sureglymop]

I understand what you mean but wouldn't you say that in itself seems a bit careless considering the scope and context of this project?

But I get it, at least it doesn't have no license.

[hnlmorg]

> By making everything licensed with the absolute bottom wrung restrictions, you're just made it even easier for corpos to have free pickings of any given tool on the internet to incorporate into their own tools and have never-ending Amazon and Elasticsearch situations.

I've already given plenty of examples of BSD-licensed coreutils. If an evil corporation wanted to steal coreutils, they wouldn't need to take the Rust implementation. And as a bonus, if they took FreeBSD/OpenBSD/whatever, they'd get a project that's far more mature too.

It is, after all, exactly what Apple did with Darwin.

> Obviously the community wouldn't even be here to begin with if it wasn't for Linux going with a GPLv2 license.

That's survivor bias and doesn't fall in line with my experiences using Linux and BSD in the 90s.

BSD originally had a bigger community than Linux for quite a while. What accelerated Linux wasn't the license; it was the hacker culture.

BSD systems were tightly controlled ecosystems, whereas Linux was a free-for-all because the kernel was managed by a different developer to the guy who managed GNU. So everything about the GNU/Linux ecosystem was disparate projects slapped together. This encouraged others to slap their own parts to GNU/Linux. This is why fsck needed to exist: the file system was slapped together so Linux needed a way to fix file corruptions. It's why there's different package managers and why the concept of a "distribution" exists in the first place.

It's what made Linux approachable and it meant development on Linux happened at a much faster pace than on BSD.

Then all of those hackers got jobs. Became managers. And recommended Linux because it's what they learned "UNIX" on.

Linux was basically the original "move fast and break things". If it had been licensed MIT then nothing would have changed.

> I suspect, should there come a time in the future where we realize that this may have been a critical error, it'll be far too late to correct it.

The GPL vs BSD argument is probably older than you've been alive. It's probably older than a considerable number of HNers have been alive. And it's been proven time and time again that it's an ideological debate that has no practical truth. Hence why people stopped arguing it.

[coldtea]

>you're just made it even easier for corpos to have free pickings of any given tool on the internet to incorporate into their own tools

So? That's allowed, they should do whatever they want with that code. I've preferred most MIT/Apache stuff over GNU alternatives even for personal use.

>Obviously the community wouldn't even be here to begin with if it wasn't for Linux going with a GPLv2 license. Going forward, with everything becoming more MIT/BSD licensed, I wonder to see how the community/ecosystem will fare.

There are tons of projects with MIT/BSD/Apache and decades of community participation. Including *BSD and Apache server themselves...

Linux being GNU didn't help it becoming driven by big companies paying all the core developers...

[coldtea]

>The reason “rewrite in Rust” gets a lot of hate is because it’s often a poorer replica in that it supports a subset of features

That's exactly what's needed in many cases tho: someone to drop most of the legacy features.

[hnlmorg]

I like how you’ve spun a negative into a positive, and I do mean that sincerely. But if we are honest, legacy features hidden behind flags have never been an issue requiring deprecation.

[em-bee]

removing features reduces code complexity, feature flags don't. and in this case, if you need the legacy features the original apps are still there and maintained, so it's not like we lose functionality like you would if an upgrade removed features and you'd be forced to decide to choose between the old version and the new one.

[hnlmorg]

The thing with this approach is that it only works for a limited time. Then that new project starts to gain the same bloat and people then make the same complaints and rewrite it again. The whole approach is a wasteful churn of NIH (not invented here) syndrome just to produce mediocre replicas.

This is why I said rewrites should be introducing something new, rather than just removing something old.

Plus if you really want to remove old feature flags, you can just do that in the original projects. You don't need to rewrite to remove features.

When I read of rewrites that are a subset of the original, and particularly when they advertise themselves as "opinionated", is a project that the author started to learn x, y or z. And that's a fine goal in itself. But I just wish people were more honest and say "I wrote this to learn Rust".

None of these criticisms apply to bat, though. This tool is adding something new.

[soraminazuki]

bat isn't really a rewrite though. It complements cat and less rather than replace them, and it even uses less. Or maybe it's a rewrite of lesspipe.sh?

[3836293648]

Bat just pipes itself into less, it doesn't peimplement any paging

[soraminazuki]

lesspipe.sh isn't a pager but a preprocessor for less that does syntax highlighting among other things.

https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe

[ajkjk]

does... it... get a lot of hate? I've only ever heard of it positively.

[DonaldPShimoda]

If you hang around certain spaces of the internet (here, Reddit, etc), any sufficiently popular post about a Rust-related project is bound to accrue some comments along the lines of "Rust is actually not that great", "rewriting is bound to gain new bugs that won't be caught", "the borrow checker is practically byzantine and not worth the trouble", "C is perfectly adequate", "more advanced type systems are less useful than writing more tests", etc. I would even say that comments of this nature constituted a good chunk of the discussion around the US government's C-to-Rust initiative (a very popular post with a lot of comments).

[lenkite]

The Rust Blowback had some reasons: People arbitrarily opening bug-tickets on various projects saying they should be Rewritten in Rust for Safety. This became a Meme.

[burntsushi]

Just like some highly publicized cases of child kidnapping led to "stranger danger."

Reasons, yes. But not very good ones and blown way out of proportion.

[DonaldPShimoda]

In my experience, the majority of negative responses are rooted in fundamental misunderstandings of type systems and expressive power. The vast majority of everyday programmers are pretty much only familiar with Java or TypeScript when it comes to statically typed languages, and it can be hard to get people with that background to understand or appreciate the substantial increase in capability that systems like Rust's provide.

(The issue is further exacerbated, in my opinion, by the prevailing notion that test-driven development is superior to — or at least generally more than adequate for — anything and everything that could be desired. Years ago there was a tense Twitter exchange between Bob Martin [of "Clean Code" note] and Shriram Krishnamurthi [a prominent programming languages researcher and professor at Brown University] on this topic, Martin seemingly unwilling to move past a TDD-oriented worldview at that time.)

[ajkjk]

Ah maybe it's an another example of people using Twitter and the conflating the brainrot on there with reality.

[nine_k]

It's often framed as useless monkey business, rewriting working software to produce a copy of it but in another language, for questionable benefits.

I'd say that rewriting anything in any language (even in the same language) would remove large amounts of cruft, and add long-missing neat things that are easier to add when you build from scratch, and with a good understanding which the original authors lacked. Often it also can afford using a better architecture, see rg vs grep: grep has many brilliant technical solutions, but making it multithreaded would be a major rewrite anyway.

[pityJuke]

Along with everything else mentioned, there is a certain group of people who consider the language “woke”. Usually that’s not the critique you see on HN, but be wary of it.

[ajkjk]

Well that's laughable so probably not worth thinking about.