GNU coreutils is one of the pillars of our civilization. Re-implementing it in several new languages can only benefit everybody, as it will lead to a higher understanding of all the implementations, including the original one.
So far, the tests of this Rust version seem to be used to compare against GNU coreutils, with a goal to attain feature parity. I hope in the near future, the careful memory management of Rust will motivate new tests that will be passed by the Rust version but failed bu the C one (e.g., some memory leak, or an input that triggers a segfault in the C version). Then, you will see a new curve in the graph concerning the number of tests failed by the C version, which at some point will cross the decreasing curve of the Rust version! The coverage of the rust implementation is still a bit sparse for that, but hopefully it will improve.
There is one feature, though, that is unfortunately missing in this Rust re-implementation: the fact that users of coreutils will always be able to examine the source code of the programs that they run. This is guaranteed by the original copyleft license. Βut this Rust version uses a "stealable" license that allows distributors of these programs to strip users of that right. This is really sad.
GNU coreutils is one of the pillars of our civilization. Re-implementing it in several new languages can only benefit everybody, as it will lead to a higher understanding of all the implementations, including the original one.
So far, the tests of this Rust version seem to be used to compare against GNU coreutils, with a goal to attain feature parity. I hope in the near future, the careful memory management of Rust will motivate new tests that will be passed by the Rust version but failed bu the C one (e.g., some memory leak, or an input that triggers a segfault in the C version). Then, you will see a new curve in the graph concerning the number of tests failed by the C version, which at some point will cross the decreasing curve of the Rust version! The coverage of the rust implementation is still a bit sparse for that, but hopefully it will improve.
There is one feature, though, that is unfortunately missing in this Rust re-implementation: the fact that users of coreutils will always be able to examine the source code of the programs that they run. This is guaranteed by the original copyleft license. Βut this Rust version uses a "stealable" license that allows distributors of these programs to strip users of that right. This is really sad.