alt Hacker NewsWhy would Canonical even be an expert in this? They mostly have sysadmin types of employees.
The (elusive) end goal is of course to steal all C code bases, fully automate Debian with LLMs, fire all useful idiots who vote in Canonical's interest in Debian resolutions and control the Debian derivative market.
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Even without any LLM usage after the rewrite, there might be a change in license as seen with similar projects, which supports your argument.
From the article:
> The company points to projects such as uutils coreutils and sudo-rs as examples of Rust implementations that have earned a place in the distribution.
uutils is licensed under MIT, instead of GPL like the original coreutils, and thus it would be easier to grab.
The article's claim that the Rust implementations earned their place in the distributions is also not true, it was more that they were forced into Ubuntu despite bugs and memory unsafety in the Rust implementations.
The general trend is interesting. C is an ancient language, and it is also minimalistic. And while Rust has lots of features with lots of problems, like its borrow checker that among other problems drives code towards deadlocks and TOCTOU bugs https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-rust-match-made-in-hell , some of Rust's other features, like tagged unions and pattern matching, are by themselves attractive to many developers.
> Why would Canonical even be an expert in this?
Does it matter? The announcement is that they're funding a PhD project. I don't think it's that unusual to fund a project whose outcome you are interested in even if you don't have the expertise needed to carry it out yourself.
As a former Canonical employee, where I was the leader and engineering owner of Cloud and Server products, you are pretty off the mark here.
In my >25 year career, my team were the best engineers I have worked with and I'd work again with any of them in a heart-beat. Most of them have moved on to other impactful roles at other organisations and delivering amazing things.
None of them were "sysadmin" people.
> They mostly have sysadmin types of employees.
What on earth led you to that conclusion?
I don't see a reason to believe they're not capable of doing this. Plus, it's not only Canonical working on this, they are _funding_ the development in partnership with University of Bristol. They'll obviously leverage AI to do part of this migration (as explained in TFA).
It'll be interesting to see how successful this research project can be. Plus, moving to Rust is a long-term strategy adopted by various other Linux/OSS based projects so they're not unique in this regard.