Re:Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
by JulianMorrison on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @05:45PM
(#11340187)
A rewrite automatically makes things worse because you start with no code.
I figure it's one of the signs of programmer maturity, that you start to look askance at rewrites. So tempting, yet so rarely even finished let alone better.
Re:Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
by DannoHung on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @06:35PM
(#11340474)
In the case of Rust I don't believe this is 100% true given C ABI compatibility. You could start rewriting in such a way that it is integrated with the existing code and slowly, but surely tease the C out of the system.
Re:Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
by JulianMorrison on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @06:52PM
(#11340584)
It would for the longest time be a C program with a metastasizing wart of Rust hung off the side, impossible to get into, impossible to work with, debugging hell, compilation hell. The distros would weep.
Re:Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
by pcwalton on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @07:01PM
(#11340632)
Programs written in multiple languages are not exactly a new thing. Every iOS and Mac app is one, just to name one example.
And Firefox has a good chance to become exactly what you describe with the weird cancer analogy--in fact, the nightly builds already are.
Agreed, they do. But that it hasn't been proven to make things better doesn't mean it will make things worse. It just means that we don't know enough to say. The right way to answer the "would this software have fewer bugs if it were rewritten in Rust?" question requires a detailed look at what bugs the software has empirically encountered.