Re:Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust
by hueho on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:12AM
(#44310076)
Plenty of people dislike the perceived bload in GNU utils - for them a rewrite from scratch is a feature, not a bug.
Re:Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust
by monster_truck on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:21AM
(#44310158)
What's the point of mentioning you suspect it is happening other than as a dig at them?
Re:Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust
by coldpie on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:31AM
(#44310235)
You're 100% right. I removed it.
"Seems like a waste of effort" in a vacuum yes, but
1 - GNU utilities is ancient crufty #IFDEF'd C that's been in maintenance mode for decades. You want code to handle quirks of Tru64 and Ultrix? You got it.
2 - Waving your hands around 'the community will take care of it' is magical thinking. C developers don't grow on trees. C tooling is kinda weird and doesn't resemble anything modern - good luck finding enough VOLUNTEER C developers to make your goals happen.
2) I think the MIT license was a mistake. These are often cloning GNU utilities, so referencing GNU source in its original language and then re-implementing it in Rust would be the obvious thing to do. But porting GPL-licensed code to an MIT licensed project is not allowed. Instead, the utilities must be re-implemented from scratch, which seems like a waste of effort. I would be interested in doing the work of porting GNU source to Rust, but I'm not interested in re-writing them all from scratch, so I haven't contributed to this project.