In recent years, we have witnessed Rust being used to develop crucial foundational software that was originally built with C/C++, driven by Rust’s language-level security. Examples of such projects include the new su/sudo written in Rust, Rustls as a replacement for OpenSSL, and Apache’s mod_tls.
Within the Linux ecosystem, there are essential core software components commonly referred to as coreutils. Examples of frequently used commands include ls, ln, more, chmod, chown, cat, printenv, and wc. These software utilities have been developed by the GNU project since the ’90s using the C language.
Since 2021, a project called uutils has emerged with the aim of rewriting software in the coreutils suite and similar tools like findutils (find, locate) and diffutils in Rust. With partial funding from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund, the project aims to seamlessly replace existing software so that users can type traditional commands and achieve the same outcomes without worrying about the underlying changes.
Currently, the project is progressing adequately, with the latest version 0.0.25 passing compatibility tests with the original GNU coreutils at 72.35%. Progress seems promising, and it might be a matter of only a few more years to completely replace the old coreutils.
TLDR: Rust has been increasingly used for developing foundational software, with projects like uutils aiming to replace traditional coreutils with Rust-written alternatives for seamless transition and compatibility.
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