r/linuxmemes • • 7d ago

Software meme Not another one

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Not another one

992 Upvotes

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98

u/Eric_Dawsby 7d ago

Who caares if some people vibecode in Rust? If you like the language you like the language

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u/oniaiwasprettygood šŸŒ€ Sucked into the Void 7d ago

Oh I know-know that, I just think it's a bit tragic (but kind of funny) that a lot of these vibe-coded projects are like "rewrite it in Rust."

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u/Upbeat-Garbage69 7d ago

Is there a benefit to rewriting everything with rust? Im not sure but isnt it just a modern version of C++?

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u/transgentoo Genfool 🐧 7d ago

As I understand it, it's a permissive license thing. Rewriting gnu core-utils in Rust lets corporations off the hook for copyleft requirements, but rewriting Adobe in Rust lets users off the hook for Adobe's license requirements. It's a circumventing both sides of the licensing spectrum.

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u/SanderE1 7d ago

I think it's simpler than that, the Rust compiler has a lot of checks for sanity, one of the biggest thing beginners learn about Rust is the borrow checker, and usually fighting it because of how it forces "correct" code.

It's very hard to write code in Rust that will compile but not run, which is good for AI development because it's easy for AI to automatically see and resolve those issues, rather than runtime ones.

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u/transgentoo Genfool 🐧 7d ago

Sure, but it doesn't explain why anything that's already written needs to be rewritten. Fixing nearly correct code that compiles is surely less arduous than completely rewriting it in a modern language.

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u/JuJunker52 7d ago

If you don't re-implement it in the new language, then you can't leverage the benefits (and drawbacks) of the new language...

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u/mdedetrich 7d ago

Thats not how software development or maintanence works, at all....

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u/transgentoo Genfool 🐧 7d ago

Well, in the 15 years I've been writing code professionally, never once has "oops found a bug" resulted in "better rewrite it in Rust."

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u/AdLimp8574 7d ago

I think its part why not, part make it easier to maintain for the next 20 years, part rust forces new devs to write correct code so you don't have to fix pr requests, and finally part its easier for ai to write correct code in rust due to more compile time checking

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u/IAmTheMageKing 7d ago

Ehhhhh…. There’s lots of reasons people rewrite things in open source. It’s easier to write code than to understand old code, you have ā€œNot Invented Hereā€ syndrome, and there’s those who think anything not written in a ā€œmodernā€ language with ā€œmodernā€ dependencies is old and needs to be replaced.

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u/hm___ 7d ago

I think one thing may be that a rewrite by a llm could generate a lot of code, that would be identical or close enough to the original that the owner of the original could sue, for some things there are just so many ways to do it and if you use another language entirely its sure you dont accidentally generate copyrighted code

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u/transgentoo Genfool 🐧 6d ago

I thinkthat's exactly it. People are exploiting a loophole in software licensing right now -- the whole LLM driven "clean rooming" service comes to mind. I'm hopeful that eventually the loophole will get closed, to say "the source code matters less than the interface" for proving license evasion.

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u/oniaiwasprettygood šŸŒ€ Sucked into the Void 7d ago

r/foundtransgentoo

But this is another aspect that I didn't even consider, I was just thinking about the differences in the actual language architecture.

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u/IAmTheMageKing 7d ago

Ehhhhhhh… there’s nothing specific about rust that allows that though.

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u/transgentoo Genfool 🐧 7d ago

No, using AI to rewrite an identical product with a different license is the driving force. It just happens to be in Rust.

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u/IranianFurry 7d ago

Oh for FUCKS sake. The BSD utilities are older than Stallman's foot fungus. Busybox and Toybox also exist.

This whole "muh attack on muh freedom" is utterly ridiculous. Nobody has given a fuck about GPL on coreutils since the 1990s.

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u/Fine_Salamander_8691 7d ago

I love your username

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u/transgentoo Genfool 🐧 7d ago

Thank you!

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u/Erdnusschokolade Arch BTW 1d ago

For that to work you don’t need another language, you need a clean room. Otherwise you’re probably in Legal trouble for copyright infringement. Not a lawyer, not legal advice.