Your interpretation is what I intended. Thing is, I don't anticipate ever needing to touch the code if I use the utilities installed by default on whatever Linux distribution I'm using (which includes Windows, which I use as an interface for WSL). Even if I was comfortable with Rust, which I'm not and haven't used in years, it would still take a lot of time to understand the code well enough to make changes.
Yeah, I totally get the longevity argument. But that precludes any useful new tools, and I'm personally never happy with the status quo; I don't think the software developers of the 60s and 70s discovered the perfect final set of useful userspace tools. And none of them would have thought they had either, and would have scoffed at the idea of being stuck indefinitely on a static set of commands. Their whole philosophy was about making it easy to make and cobble together little tools like this!
But in practice, the tooling for making those tools never got very good. (That is, in my opinion - there is at least one commenter here who replied to me about actually liking autotools, which is fair enough, just not my opinion.)
So while fully recognizing the value of the old tools that will always exist, for new useful tools, I'm very happy to see this renaissance of writing them in rust. In my opinion, it is much easier to build them, dig into their implementation, and contribute to them (especially without introducing security vulnerabilities or data races).
Where I do absolutely agree, and what I do wish for is that more of this were being done under the auspices of an organization, like how the `ls` most of us are using is likely maintained by either GNU or one of the BSD organizations.
