An appropriate amount of work to slap an MIT license on somebody else's work (lemmy.nz)

submitted 4 months ago by cockmushroom@reddthat.com to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[-] KindaABigDyl@programming.dev 49 points 4 months ago

Are they using any original GNU coreutils code as reference? My understanding is nothing is 1:1. They're trying to build, from the ground up, a totally new codebase that has the same user-facing functionality but under the hood is idomatic Rust code (so nothing like the GNU C code)

They are recreating something that matches behavior not using licensed GPL code. Which is the same way the GNU coreutils were a recreation of the proprietary Unix tools in an effort to provide open source alternatives.

Like you wouldn't say "An appropriate amount of work to slap a GPL license on somebody else's work" in reference to GNU recreating the Unix tools, so why say it here?

[+] cockmushroom@reddthat.com -11 points 4 months ago

I may not but then I wouldn't need to say that because as you acknowledged, but don't actually seem to understand, the USP of coreutils or GNU was not simply an api, but open source technology and they delivered on that in ways where the actual merits of their contribution are unambiguous. If the "rewrite it in rust" crowd were forthcoming about shelling out the real work to c then there'd be absolutely nothing to talk about here, but then we also wouldn't have windows sidelining their fancy modern powershell for a 2nd order rehash of unix tools by people who likely never used them.

inb4 they buy a license too.

[-] KindaABigDyl@programming.dev 17 points 4 months ago

were forthcoming about shelling out the real work to c

When did they shell out "real work" to C?

There is no C in the repo: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

They aren't wrapping the GNU coreutils in a Rust shell; it's a total unaffiliated reverse-engineering

[-] edinbruh@feddit.it 12 points 4 months ago

I would like to interject for a moment. What you are referring to as coreutils Is actually coreutils+libc+Linux... And fill the rest yourself.

The "anti rust" crowd spends half of their time yapping about how you still need c in some places, then why did you get upset with calling into libc here? Are you suggesting to rewrite every rust program in C so you can have only c calling into c?

[-] cockmushroom@reddthat.com 1 points 4 months ago

Generally I don't consider myself anti rust as a technology, and/since many of my favourite tools happen to be written in it. Consequently, I don't generally fall into the critics of c/unsafe usage.
That said, for the purpose of understanding the point being raised, it's important to understand the difference between uutils, its philosophy, and rust at large. This isn't just an arbitrary rust project, it's one that specifically claims to replace a C project. Is it the kind of thing I would encourage use of rust for? Absolutely not and I don't hold any ill will to people pursing these, or similar, projects for pedagogical reasons. That's not what uutils is or aims to be though. If the language's system API isn't ready for this sort of project, then I think that would be a more fruitful use of these people's time and whatever funds the project maintainers are collecting. I'm just a bum though, so don't mind me.

[-] edinbruh@feddit.it 7 points 4 months ago

Well, if you want to be pedantic, I'll entertain you a bit more.

You see, C and Unix were "born" together. So sometimes, POSIX intertwines them in weird ways. In this case, getlogin is declared in unistd.h because it's part of the Unix standard API, however the POSIX standard states that it must be implemented in libc. So the POSIX compliant way to getlogin is to call into libc, which doesn't need to be glibc, you could use musl and avoid the GNU dependencies. If rust's stdlib were to offer a getlogin function, the proper approach would be to still call libc. It's like if on windows you were to call into Win32 to getuser, except on *nix it's the same file as libc.

If you want to replace the getlogin implementation, the POSIX compliant place to do it is not in coreutils but in libc, like the aforementioned musl library does.

So the key here is that getlogin is not art of the c system API. It is actually part of the POSIX APIs, it is just "located" inside of libc, which by the way, does not need to be GNU if you are concerned with uutils' philosophy.

[-] cockmushroom@reddthat.com -2 points 4 months ago

I don't think I do want to be pedantic but, to be explicitly clear, the philosphy I'm associating with uutils is capured by the "rewritie it in rust" mantra, so whether or not their posix compliant interface uses GNU code is beside the point.

More importantly, if their goal was a posix compliant api, then I'd have assumed they would have included that in their repo description, or even called the project posix.rs; but they didn't. What's more is that the rust standard library isn't equivalent to that of C, so it would still make sense that for a project whose goal was, or has simply become, to replace a C codebase would offer a safe C alternative to its dependencies. But maybe that's their next step; an internal library offering enough of a posix api to avoid surprises like these.

[-] edinbruh@feddit.it 8 points 4 months ago

Not at all. I would not expect any riir project to reimplement the entire stack in rust. This is not calling a random C dependency. This is literally calling the OS's API. Literally there's just this and the kernel.

As you said its goal is to rewrite a C codebase. The C codebase is coreutils. The correct way to getuser is to use the OS's API, which happens to be inside libc.so, which has nothing to do with coreutils, it's an entirely different codebase. End of the story. The OS's API needs to be exposed as a c library, because c is the only language that can be imported from any other language. If you were to rewrite it in rust, it would use extern 'C' and it could not be any other way. And uutils would still import it from libc.

Maybe one day we'll see a rust rewrite of libc (tho it doesn't make much sense), but this has nothing to do with uutils.

If you are asking for a rust wrapper around the correct way to getuser, you have literally posted it. You can find it in uutils.

Also, being compliant is just being compliant. I wouldn't expect it to be called something like POSIX.rs unless it were implementing every part of POSIX. Which is clearly not what we have here. Or are you suggesting that bash should be called POSIX.c, because it's in c and it's POSIX compliant?

[-] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 28 points 4 months ago

I can't believe that Rust developers would call POSIX functions to interact with the operating system! The audacity!

[-] cockmushroom@reddthat.com -2 points 4 months ago

I can, now, but I didn't expect them to be the exact same ones behind this project.

[-] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 19 points 4 months ago

You didn't expect them to use the standard low-level, cross-platform API to build cross-platform coreutils?

[-] savvywolf@pawb.social 11 points 4 months ago

This "someone else" being... A C API header which can't be copyrighted/copylefted anyway?

[-] cockmushroom@reddthat.com -2 points 4 months ago

This is about coreutils, b

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 6 points 4 months ago

Can somebody explain why they are using libc in the first place?

[-] ace@lemmy.ananace.dev 35 points 4 months ago

Because it's a rust implementation of coreutils, and not a rust implementation of coreutils and libc?

[-] db2@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 points 4 months ago

But why is libc necessary in the first place? Are the functions not provided by the stdlib of rust?

[-] ace@lemmy.ananace.dev 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

No, the Rust standard library only contains functions useful for standard Rust, not POSIX/Linux user-space -specific functionality from libc.

[-] somegeek@programming.dev 3 points 4 months ago

Fuck this rust coreutils projects.

I'm sure it's google, meta and some other shits behind it. Otherwise, the creators are just too fucking dumb for licensing their project under MIT.

this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026

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