[influx]

It really makes me upset that we are throwing away decades of battle tested code just because some people are excited about the language du jour. Between the systemd folks and the rust folks, it may be time for me to move to *BSD instead of Linux. Unfortunately, I'm very tied to Docker.

[stouset]

That “battle-tested code” is often still an enduring and ongoing source of bugs. Maintainers have to deal with the burden of working in a 20+ year-old code base with design and architecture choices that probably weren’t even a great idea back then.

Very few people are forcing “rewrite in rust” down anyone’s throats. Sometimes it’s the maintainers themselves who are trying to be forward-thinking and undertake a rewrite (e.g., fish shell), sometimes people are taking existing projects and porting them just to scratch an itch and it’s others’ decisions to start shipping it (e.g., coreutils). I genuinely fail to see the problem with either approach.

C’s long reign is coming to an end. Some projects and tools are going to want to be ahead of the curve, some projects are going to be behind the curve. There is no perfect rate at which this happens, but “it’s battle-tested” is not a reason to keep a project on C indefinitely. If you don’t think {pet project you care about} should be in C in 50 years, there will be a moment where people rewrite it. It will be immature and not as feature-complete right out the gate. There will be new bugs. Maybe it happens today, maybe it’s 40 years from now. But the “it’s battle tested, what’s the rush” argument can and will be used reflexively against both of those timelines.

[az09mugen]

As long as LLVM (C++ but still) is not rewritten is rust [0] , I don't buy it. C is like JavaScript, it's not perfect, is everywhere and you cannot replace it without a lot of effort and bugfix/regression tests.

If I take for example sqlite (25 years old [3]) there are already 2 rewrites in rust [1] and [2], and each one has its bugs.

And as an end user I'm more enclined to trust the battle-tested original for my prod than its copies. As long as I don't have the proof the rewrite is at least as good as the original, I'll stay with the original. Simple equals more maintainable. That's also why sqlite maintainers won't rewrite it in any other language [4].

The trade of rust is "you can lose features and have unexpected bugs like any other language, but don't worry they will be memory safe bugs".

I'm not saying rust is bad and you should not rewrite anything in it, but IMHO rust programmers tend to overestimate the quality of the features they deliver [5] or something along these lines.

Memory safe != good product

[0] https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/overview.html [1] https://github.com/epilys/rsqlite3 [2] https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso/ [3] https://sqlite.org/chronology.html [4] https://www.sqlite.org/whyc.html [5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-25.10-Broken-Upgrade

[johnmaguire]

systemd has been the de facto standard for over a decade now and is very stable. I have found that even most people who complained about the initial transition are very welcoming of its benefits now.

[phicoh]

Depends a bit on how you define systemd. Just found out that the systemd developers don't understand DNS (or IPv6). Interesting problems result from that.

[chillingeffect]

Even worse, the license requirements (gpl->mit) will be less beneficial to the community than the rust replacements.

[steveklabnik]

Rust has no specific license requirements on code written in it. People choose whatever license they prefer.

[vablings]

I agree that throwing away battle tested code is wasteful and often not required. Most people are not of the mindset of just throwing things away but there is a drive to make things better. There are some absolute monoliths such as the Linux kernel that will likely never break free of its C shackles and thats completely okay and acceptable to me

[crote]

Well, what's the alternative?

It is basic knowledge that memory safety bugs are a significant source of vulnerabilities, and by now it well-established that the first developer who can avoid C without introducing memory safety bugs hasn't been born yet. In other words: if you care about security at all, continuing with the status quo isn't an option.

The C ecosystem has tried to solve the problem with a variety of additional tooling. This has helped a bit, but didn't solve the underlying problem. The C community has demonstrated that it is both unwilling and unable to evolve C into a memory-safe language. This means that writing additional C code is a Really Bad Idea.

Software has to be maintained. Decade-old battle-tested codebases aren't static: they will inevitably require changes, and making changes means writing additional code. This means that your battle-tested C codebase will inevitably see changes, which means it will inevitably see the introduction of new memory safety bugs.

Google's position is that we should simply stop writing new code in C: you avoid the high cost and real risk of a rewrite, and you also stop the neverending flow memory safety bugs. This approach works well for large and modular projects, but doing the same in coreutils is a completely different story.

Replacing battle-tested code with fresh code has genuine risks, there's no way around that. The real question is: are we willing to accept those short-term risks for long-term benefits?

And mind you, none of this is Rust-specific. If your application doesn't need the benefits of C, rewriting it in Python or Typescript or C# might make even more sense than rewriting it in Rust. The main argument isn't "Rust is good", but "C is terrible".

[eviks]

But the result of the battle test is the reason to throw the crippled veteran away!