Which makes sense because in 2025 people have grown tired of lack of improvement so that some esoteric ass compiler from the 90s still works or someones 30 year old bash script still functions.
Pros and Cons either way for better or worse depending on your perspective.
I've largely lost patience with the current culture of sacrificing any backwards compatibility that is slightly inconvenient in the name of “improvement”.
That’s an argument against creating uuutils; it is a project that aims for coreutils 100% compatibility. eza, bat, ripgrep, etc are more exciting for at least having different features than coreutils
I was more commenting on the Rust community being ready to make breaking changes.
Personally while I think Rust is a decent language it would not have caught on with younger devs if C/C++ didn't have such a shitty devex that is stuck 30 years in the past.
Younger people will always be more willing to break things and messing around with ancient and unfriendly build/dev does not attract that demographic because why waste time messing around with the build env that actually getting things done.
One day rust will be the same and the process will start again.
If you're on unix, I think the only thing you really need is cc and ld. The build system aims for flexibility instead of each project being its own personal world and things are duplicated ad momentum. Everyone is happy playing in their little sandbox instead of truly collaborating with each other and create great software.
Indeed. This is exactly the problem. It is no fun helping with maintenance of an existing project, fix some boring bug, deal with all the historical constraints, necessary support for old systems, etc.
It is so much more fun to cargo-download some stuff and build some new shiny Rust-xyz implementation of Z on your Apple Macbook and even get some HN attention just for this. The problem with all the Rust hype is that people convince themselves that they are actually helping the world by being part of a worthwhile cause to rid the world from old languages, while the main effect is that i draws resources away from much more important efforts and places an even higher burden on the ecosystem - making our main problem - sustainable maintenance of free software - even harder.
I'm not sure a post about a 12 year long project dealing with fixing bugs to match historical constraints with a make build option was really the best choice for this particular rant.
It's an argument for/against doing anything. The question is how large of a change can you get away with. Ubuntu seems to think they can get away with a 1:1 replacement being acceptable by 26.04, I doubt they'd think the same about forcing alternative tooling options just because the impetus is the same.
Improvement to what? It's not like anyone is creating a new paradigm (or even ripping off an old one, like smalltalk or plan9). It's mostly coming up with a different defaults.
Pros and Cons either way for better or worse depending on your perspective.