The crux of his argument isn’t really that these tools can’t be written. The self-bootstrapping requirement of OpenBSD means that incorporating one Rust-based core utility would require Rust and LLVM to be built when building OpenBSD, which is an incredibly large cost. It’s simply too early to seriously entertain such a notion.

Once there are a large number of core utilities implemented in Rust that show some significant practical benefit over the C versions, the situation may be different.