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Coreutil rewrites

Noted by on his .


This was originally a reply to another post. That post has been deleted.

Can we agree to rewrite all the GNU utilities in Rust

The advantage of POSIX coreutils is their portability and universality; I can expect them to be present on any POSIX system. If re-writing will sacrifice portability, we might as well do a clean break from POSIX and seek to improve upon existing coreutils rather than replace them. I listed some on my “uses” page: Zsh+DASH, ripgrep, sd, and fd. Three of those are written in Rust.

release them with a better licence

I actually do like copyleft for more substantial works. However, POSIX shell utilities have been implemented many times over: Busybox, Toybox, and FreeBSD utilities come to mind. The specific free license they use is no longer important.