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What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2026/02/23/ubuntu-rustnation/
56•zdw•2h ago

Comments

UI_at_80x24•1h ago
I've been a fan of all rust-based utilities that I've used. I am worried that 20+ (??) years of bug fixes and edge-case improvements can't be accounted for by simply using a newer/better code-base.

A lot of bug fixes/exploits are _CAUSED_ by the C+ core, but still... Tried & true vs new hotness?

bbkane•1h ago
I think it's worth trying!
UI_at_80x24•1h ago
It absolutely is worth trying. I look forward to it being battle tested and proven. I just don't want to be the one doing the testing.

rg, fzf, and several others that I can't think have proven to me that rust is the direction going forward.

petcat•1h ago
Is Rust still considered "new hotness"? I feel like the industry has long-since moved past that perceived "blocker".

It seems like Rust is now just the default in all manner of critical systems.

0x457•39m ago
Rust - no. sudo-rs not hotness, but relatively new.
giancarlostoro•1h ago
Don't hate me for this, but... is 20 years of Rust really new?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)

I do get what you mean, but Rust has been baking for a decade, finally took off after 10 years of baking, and now that is been repeatedly tried and tested it is eating the world, as some developers suggested it could eventually do so. I however do think this shows a different problem:

If nobody writes unit tests, how do you write them when you port over projects to ensure your new language doesn't introduce regressions. All rewrites should be preceded by strong useful unit tests.

9rx•1h ago
Ideally, but if a project wasn't written with tests at the time then finding a working time machine can be a challenge. If you try to add them later you won't capture all the nuance that went into the original program. After all, if the implementation code was expressive enough to capture that nuance, you'd already have your test suite, so to speak. Tests are written to fill in the details that the rest of the code isn't able to express.
throw384748•57m ago
Rust does not even have a specification, and stable release yet! You are lucky if current version, compiles two years old code!

Rust will be "repeatedly tried and tested" maybe in year 2040!

umanwizard•50m ago
> Rust does not even have a specification

Neither do most programming languages.

> You are lucky if current version, compiles two years old code!

That's not true.

Wobbles42•44m ago
> Neither do most programming languages.

Rust is trying to replace C++ and C in particular. Those languages have specifications.

Iridescent_•49m ago
Rust has editions for strong stability guarantees, and has had them for nearly a decade i believe. Besides, tech backing has grown way past the risky point.
umanwizard•43m ago
FWIW, the GP comment's claim that you're lucky if you can compile 2-year-old code is exaggerated, but so is yours. Rust does not offer "strong stability guarantees". Adding a new method to a standard type or trait can break method inference, and the Rust standard library does that all the time.

In C or C++, this isn't supposed to happen: a conformant implementation claiming to support e.g. C++17 would use ifdefs to gate off new C++20 library functions when compiling in C++17 mode.

ChadNauseam•27m ago
Adding a new method can change the behavior of C++ code as well due to templates. Does the standard library never add new methods because of that?
jjmarr•17m ago
Yes. All the time. Subscribe to the std-proposals mailing list and you'll see so many obvious improvements get rejected due to ABI compat guarantees.
mamcx•46m ago
> years of bug fixes and edge-case improvements can't be accounted for by simply using a newer/better code-base.

Partially is in fact true: Just because the Rust use a better type system (after ML) + better resource model (aka borrow checker), and if you are decently good, you eliminate, forever!, tons of problems.

It can't solve things that arise by complex interactions or just lack of port subtle details like in parsing poor inputs (like html) but is true that changing the language in fact solve tons of things.

bbkane•1h ago
Really good references to "crossing the chasm" between early adopter needs and mainstream needs. In addition to the Ubuntu coreutils use case, I wonder what other chasms Rust is attempting to cross. I know Rust for Linux (though I think that's still relegated to drivers?) and automotive (not sure where that is).
vablings•1h ago
There are big pushes in pretty much every direction. The projects that really stand out to me are pyo3 (Replace c++ python modules with rust), Dioxus (react-like web framework), The ferrocine qualified compiler (automotive)

I think right now the ecosystem is pretty ripe and with DARPA TRACTOR there are only more and more reasons every day to put rust on your toolbelt.

I am secretly hoping that eventually we break free from the cycle of "hire a senior dev and he likes rust so the company switches" over to hey let's hire some good mid-level and junior rust developers

Wobbles42•42m ago
Are mid level and junior developers being hired anywhere for any reason right now? I don't mean specifically rust developers. I mean software developers.
system2•1h ago
Why am I hearing about Rust a lot these days? Did anything significant happen?
iFire•53m ago
Most of the platforms were successfully petitioned to have rust sdk mandatory added so that rust code can be added to the platforms. The previously situation was rust was not allowed because the external dependency of the rust sdk was blocked.

Note that the rust having no stable api is not fixed, so I think there's a bunch of internal systems on each platform to hard lock the rust dependencies across multiple rust users.

There's some friction between platform packagers and the code that the author wrote exactly as it was written.

canadiantim•42m ago
AI has made it exceptionally easy to program with.

I've switched to using Rust from Python simply because of AI development

system2•34m ago
Really? You think AI writes better Rust than Python? Can you give me some examples? I strictly code Django, and Claude Code is really good at following my lead with it.
mikepurvis•22m ago
I think the argument is more that working rust code is better than working Python, and AI assistance makes it more tenable for average developers to successfully produce working rust code, and in particular is helpful for navigating the gap between "code written" and "code compiling" (eg why is the borrow checked mad at me).
theLiminator•22m ago
I think relative to the typical Rust code it likely does worse than AI relative to the typical Python code. But due to the compiler, it's possible you might get more correctness out of AI-generated rust code on average.
ChadNauseam•18m ago
The compile errors are great. I can change one function signature and have my output fill up with compile errors (that would all be runtime errors in python). Then I just let claude cook on fixing them. Any time you have to run your program and tell claude what’s wrong with it you’re wasting time, but because claude can run the compiler itself and iterate it’s much more able to complete a task without intervention.
xcrjm•16m ago
Even if it writes the same or even somewhat worse rust than python, assuming the output is the same you are likely to get a speedup + a better distribution story.
the_duke•13m ago
Rust has a very strict type system and an ecosystem that often utilizes the type system well.

Many things that would only be caught at runtime in other languages are caught at compile time in Rust, making coding agents iterate until things compile and work well.

Rust also has great error messages, which help the agents in fixing compilation errors.

bitwize•13m ago
Indeed. With AI lifting legacy code bases into Rust got a whole lot easier, and purging the blight of C from the world, excepting the most deeply embedded of applications, got a whole lot closer.
Jaxan•26m ago
What do you mean by “these days”? To me, it seems like rust is a pretty constant factor on HN for at least two years now.
pizlonator•56m ago
Here's the chasm I want to see Rust cross:

Dynamic linking with a safe ABI, where if you change and recompile one library then the outcome has to obey some definition of safety, and ABI stability is about as good as C or Objective-C or Swift.

Until that happens, it'll be hard to adopt Rust in a lot of C/C++ strongholds where C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge.

eptcyka•48m ago
The C ABI can already be used, it comes with all the existing safety guarantees that C will provide. Isn’t this as good as C?
ahartmetz•40m ago
Not really. The foreign ABI requires a foreign API, which adds friction that you don't have with C exporting a C API / ABI. I've never tried, but I would guess that it adds a lot of friction.
pizlonator•36m ago
It is as good as C.

It's also as bad as C.

I'm saying that the chasm to cross is a safe ABI.

sagarm•17m ago
There is no existing safe ABI, so this cannot be an adoption barrier.
pizlonator•12m ago
Lots of reasons why it is. I'll give you two.

1) It can't be that replacing 20 C/C++ shared objects with 20 Rust shared objects results in 20 copies of the Rust standard library and other dependencies that those Rust libraries pull in. But, today, that is what happens. For some situations, this is too much of a memory usage regression to be tolerable.

2) If you really have 20 libraries calling into one another using C ABI, then you end up with manual memory management and manual buffer offset management everywhere even if you rewrite the innards in Rust. So long as Rust doesn't have a safe ABI, the upside of a Rust rewrite might be too low in terms of safety/security gained to be worth doing

ozgrakkurt•27m ago
I found c ABI a bit too difficult in rust compared to c or zig. Mainly because of destructors. I am guessing c++ would be difficult in a similar way.

Also unsafe rust has always on strict-aliasing, which makes writing code difficult unless you do it in certain ways.

Having glue libraries like pyo3 makes it good in rust. But that introduces bloat and other issues. This has been the biggest issue I had with rust, it is too hard to write something so you use a dependency. And before you know it, you are bloating out of control

elteto•47m ago
> Until that happens, it'll be hard to adopt Rust in a lot of C/C++ strongholds where C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge.

Wait, Rust can already communicate using the C ABI. In fact, it offers exactly the same capabilities as C++ in this regard (dynamic linking).

pizlonator•37m ago
That's an unsafe ABI.
elteto•32m ago
As unsafe as C or C++. In fact, safer, because only the ABI surface is unsafe, the rust code behind it can be as safe or unsafe as you want it to be.

I was addressing this portion of your comment: "C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge". If the C ABI is what enables software to get huge then Rust is already there.

There is a second claim in your comment about a "safe ABI", but that is something that neither C or C++ offers right now.

pizlonator•27m ago
Here's the problem. If you told me that you rebuilt the Linux userland with Rust but you used C ABI at all of the boundaries, then I would be pretty convinced that you did not create a meaningful improvement to security because of how many dynamic linking boundaries there are. So many of the libraries involved are small, and big or small they expose ABIs that involve pointers to buffers and manual memory management.

> There is a second claim in your comment about a "safe ABI", but that is something that neither C or C++ offers right now.

Of course C and C++ are no safer in this regard. (Well, with Fil-C they are safer, but like whatever.)

But that misses the point, which is that:

- It would be a big deal if Rust did have a safe dynamic linking ABI. Someone should do it. That's the main point I'm making. I don't think deflecting by saying "but C is no safer" is super interesting.

- So long as this problem isn't fixed, the upside of using Rust to replace a lot of the load bearing stuff in an OS is much lower than it should be to justify the effort. This point is debatable for sure, but your arguments don't address it.

wang_li•12m ago
So you're calling for dynamic linking for rust native code? Because rust's safety doesn't come from runtime, it comes from the compiler and the generated code. An object file generated from a bit of rust source isn't some "safe" object file, it's just generated in a safe set of patterns. That safety can cross the C ABI perfectly fine if both things on either side came from rust to begin with. Which means rust dynamic linking.
kittiepryde•12m ago
Would a safe ABI work with sandboxing the C code? I'm a bit unsure how one would construct a safe C ABI from Rust's side,
duped•12m ago
How could a safe dynamic linking API ever work?

I think you're moving the goalposts significantly here.

adgjlsfhk1•12m ago
The argument for unsafe ABI not being that big of a deal is that ABI boundaries often reflect organizational boundaries as well.

E.g. the kernel wouldn't really benefit from a "safe ABI" because users calling into the kernel need to be considered malicious by default.

ahartmetz•45m ago
Dynamic linking is also great for compile time of debug builds. If a large library or application is split up into smaller shared libraries, ones unaffected by changes don't need to be touched at all. Runtime dynamic linking has a small overhead, but it's several orders of magnitude faster than compile-time linking, so not a problem in debug builds.
PaulDavisThe1st•40m ago
for developer turnaround time, it is huge. we explicitly do not statically link Ardour because as developers we are in the edit-compile-debug cycle all day every day, and speeding up the link step (which dynamic linking does dramatically, especially with parallel linkers like lld) is a gigantic improvement to our quality of life and productivity.
elteto•29m ago
A common pattern is dynamic linking for development and static linking for production-ready releases.
jjmarr•28m ago
C++ ABI stability is the main reason improvements to the language get rejected.

You cannot change anything that would affect the class layout of something in the STL. For templated functions where the implementation is in the header, ODR means you can't add optimizations later on.

Maybe this was OK in the 90s when companies deleted the source code and laid off the programmers once the software was done, but it's not a feature Rust should ever support or guarantee.

The "stable ABI" is C functions and nothing else for a very good reason.

pizlonator•24m ago
I think if Rust wants to evolve even more aggressively than C++ evolves, then that is a chasm that needs to be crossed.

In lots of domains, having a language that doesn't change very much, or that only changes very carefully with backcompat being taken super seriously, is more important than the memory safety guarantees Rust offers.

jjmarr•21m ago
In my view, this is a good thing.

As a C++ developer, I regularly deal with people that think creating a compiled object file and throwing away the source code is acceptable, or decide to hide source code for "security" while distributing object files. This makes my life hell.

Rust preventing this makes my life so much better.

pizlonator•14m ago
> As a C++ developer, I regularly deal with people that think creating a compiled object file and throwing away the source code is acceptable, or decide to hide source code for "security" while distributing object files. This makes my life hell.

I mean yeah that's bad.

> Rust preventing this makes my life so much better.

I'm talking about a different issue, which is: how do you create software that's in the billions of lines of code in scale. That's the scale of desktop OSes. Probably also the scale of some other things too.

At that scale, you can't just give everyone the source and tell them to do a world compile. Stable ABIs fix that. Also, you can't coordinate between all of the people involved other than via stable ABIs. So stable ABIs save both individual build time and reduce cognitive load.

This is true even and especially if everyone has access to everyone else's source code

SkiFire13•12m ago
C++ is still changing quite a lot though, just not in ways that fix the existing issues (often because doing so would break ABI stability).
pizlonator•10m ago
That is a reason why a lot of folks stick with C.

In some sense, the chasm I'm describing hasn't been crossed by C++ yet

stabbles•46m ago
Just today I found that rust-coreutils makes installing cuda toolkit impossible, related to use of `dd`: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/cuda-runfile-wont-extr...
nightpool•34m ago
Do you have more details? The thread you linked was about gzip, not dd.
psyclobe•41m ago
Sudo no longer supporting path inheritance kinda sucks
nekiwo•34m ago
Unrelated to the language debate, but it seems a lot of people here missed the fact that Rust Coreutils project is licensed under MIT, and I am not sure if I feel that it is the appropriate license for such project. As much as FSF's philosophy has bad PR at times with Stallman, the GPL licenses really do protect open source. Who knows what Canonical would do when all parts of Ubuntu become MIT...
jsheard•27m ago
> the GPL licenses really do protect open source.

They did, until the automatic copyright laundering machine was invented. Pretty much every piece of GPL code ever written is now being magically transmuted into MIT/BSD or proprietary code, and there's no recourse.

bluejekyll•24m ago
A discussion on licenses will go sideways very quickly. GPL does limit the adoption of software in certain environments. So it really depends on your goals. Do you want an OSS project that will be useable by everyone (including corporations) or do you want to guarantee that the software will always be OSS and guarantee that Corporations can’t benefit from it without contributing back (potentially requiring them to open their own proprietary code).

There’s a lot of moral perspective that people apply to this decision, but not all developers have the same goals for their software. MIT is more flexible in its use than GPL, but doesn’t help ensure that software remains open.

josephg•12m ago
What evil deeds are you worried about in particular? What are you afraid people will do now that coreutils is MIT?
edelbitter•27m ago
One particular chasm to keep an eye on, possibly even more relevant than Ubuntu using Rust: When it comes to building important stuff, Ubuntu sticks to curl|YOLO|bash instead of trusting trust in their own distributions.

https://github.com/canonical/firefox-snap/blob/90fa83e60ffef...

tokyobreakfast•13m ago
Wow that is pretty careless, and you are being downvoted for pointing it out.

Can't wait for this Rust clown show house of cards to collapse. Imagine a mechanic throwing out all his tools en masse to replace them with trendy new ones. This entire movement is driven by emotions and impulses, immature programmers who don't grasp the concept of leaving done software alone.

You should never trust a mechanic with shiny new tools.

deepriverfish•18m ago
a few weeks ago it was all about Zig, now it's all about Rust, Clojure or Elixir next?
kelvinjps10•17m ago
Rust was first
themafia•9m ago
> Jon made the provocative comment that we needed to revisit our policy around having a small standard library. He’s not the first to say something like that, it’s something we’ve been hearing for years and years

It sounds to me like you "cross the chasm" a little too early. As a user I don't care about your "chasms" I care about high quality durable systems. This isn't the first time I've heard the "we'll change the std lib later" logic. I've yet to see it actually work.

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