The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
@lcamtuf Hey, would you care to elaborate or point me to resources explaining why the coreutils aren't fertile ground for memory safety issues? It's the first time I heard of this
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
@lcamtuf Not only that, some of the utils were not command line-compatible with their non-Rust counterparts.
Honestly, I don't understand why these utils were rewritten. They didn't need rewriting.
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@ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf sometimes that's the only way to learn, but it's also often the most effective way to learn
@darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf Sure, but perhaps don't do your learning in production?
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https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/death-star-75419 would like a word.
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@darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf Sure, but perhaps don't do your learning in production?
@sten @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf sometimes you have to get burned to learn not to touch the stove
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
@lcamtuf
Many of those seemingly trivial utilities are surprisingly complex: sort runs in multiple concurrent threads, "cp -a" must build a lookup table to detect hardlinks, and ps parses obscure files in /proc. There's plenty of ways to screw up that a type- and memory-safe language would catch.That said, the list of CVEs in the post is really impressive. Ditching the good old GNU coreutils might have been a tad overhasty.
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https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/death-star-75419 would like a word.
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@lcamtuf i do find that the crates dedicated to atomic file handling and temp files, in the interest of providing a uniform platform interface aren't as good as what's reachable in c.
it's not a fault of the rust language per se, but writing a safe interface at that level isn't easy, so it makes sense (and is in some sense a better default) to have high level, platform neutral access here.
@prozacchiwawa @lcamtuf yeah, but coreutils is an interface for shell languages. The shell doesn't care if underlying "util" was written in C or Rust
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@darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf Sure, but perhaps don't do your learning in production?
@sten @darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf is it really production if it's not on my machine ?
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@sten @darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf is it really production if it's not on my machine ?
@m33 @sten @darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf
yep, production is for debugging -
@lcamtuf Not only that, some of the utils were not command line-compatible with their non-Rust counterparts.
Honestly, I don't understand why these utils were rewritten. They didn't need rewriting.
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@sten @darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf is it really production if it's not on my machine ?
@m33
I discovered at Google a tremendous laziness and lack of rigor because "well if it doesn't work or has problems we can roll it back." I came to think of it as The Google Principle and it can be more easily written as:The amount of care and thought that goes into a software change is proportional to the perceived difficulty of pushing that change into production.
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@lcamtuf Not only that, some of the utils were not command line-compatible with their non-Rust counterparts.
Honestly, I don't understand why these utils were rewritten. They didn't need rewriting.
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@lcamtuf a related observation would probably be: why did important, security-critical edge cases get handled without enough documentation to prevent them from reoccurring?
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@lcamtuf There's also that human habit of getting complacent about all bugs when _some_ types of bugs are either impossible or very very hard to make because of language structure and tooling.
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
@lcamtuf Yeah, but they got to license-wash the coreutils, the gnu coreutils are GPL3, the rust uutils use the much more corporate-overlord and user-abuse friendly MIT license.
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
@lcamtuf I don't take this as a dunk on Rust, I take it as a (well-deserved) dunk on repositories that accept PRs that vibe-coded entire features that clearly no one understood. Which adds even more hidden costs.
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@sten @darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf is it really production if it's not on my machine ?
@m33 @darkuncle @ChuckMcManis @lcamtuf An excellent point that I have to admit I hadn't considered.
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The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
@lcamtuf coming in at #1 with a bullet on the Joel On Software 'things you never do' list
(know its common wisdom, but think Joel articulates it very well)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
