On Fri, 10 Oct 2025 at 01:01, William Park via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
Just noticed at Distrowatch. Ubuntu is now using "coreutils" package that has been rewritten in Rust. Interesting that it's not Golang.
That is really interesting. I'm not overly surprised that Rust was chosen: it seems we're headed for Rust as the second language of choice for the Linux kernel, and there's probably both overlap and communication between the kernel devs and the coreutils devs. Rust is also known (per Wikipedia) "for its emphasis on performance, type safety, concurrency, and memory safety." Whereas Wikipedia's entry about Go says "It was designed at Google" (not something to win the hearts of most Linux programmers - not anymore) and "It is syntactically similar to C, but also has garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency." So an improvement on C, but not as much as Rust? But I think the biggest factor is the shift to making Rust a first-class language in the Linux kernel. I think that says a lot. Thanks for mentioning this: that's a big and interesting shift. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com