Mozilla, where Rust was originally conceived, have already talked about this risk factor ages ago when they were still working on Servo. Reimplementing battle-tested software in a different language can result in logic bugs being introduced, which no programming language can really prevent. Many times they will actually reintroduce bugs that have already been historically fixed in the original implementation. This doesn’t invalidate the benefits of moving to a very memory safe language, it just needs to be taken into consideration when determining whether it’s worth the risk or the effort.
Honestly I have no idea whether sudo-rs is a good idea or not, but I have my doubts that any of the other people (especially the very vocal kind) chiming in on this do. Any time Rust is involved in the Linux community, a lot of vocal critics with very little knowledge of the language or programming in general seem to appear.
This is why its generally better to only write new code in more memory safe langs instead of rewriting everything
The counterpoint is that, especially with FOSS that does not receive much (if any) corporate backing, developer retention and interest is an important factor.
If I’m donating some of my free time to a FOSS project I’d rather not slug through awful build systems, arcane mailing lists, and memory unsafe languages which may or may not use halfway decent - often homebrew - manual memory management patterns. If the project is written in Rust, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the code will be easily readable, compilable, and safer to modify.
But why the rust? there are quite a large variety of languages with memory protection (for example Java), and freely compiled (for example golang), but for some reason they persistently try to rewrite the whole “world” into rust. I’m not against rust, I’m really curious.
Many things do use go, the issue with Java lies in its massive runtime burden (also not a great language IMO)
Java isn’t an exciting language, sure.
Kotlin is, though.
in other news: software has bugs
The real problem is not Rust, or that somebody decided to rewrite sudo in Rust. These are both good things.
The actual real problem is that Ubuntu adopts these in their mainline distribution when the release version is 0.something. I mean sure, this will get the worst bugs noticed and fixed sooner but come on. Have a little empathy for your dumb users. They didn’t choose to be that way.
