I have no particular religious preference for a language. One uses what one feels is appropriate.
But, let's say this effort is a complete success. What's next?
Can all the maintainers of the c codebase move over to maintaining (forward) the Rust codebase. Surely there'll be some friction, and losses to friction.
What about deployments, monitoring, support and trouble-shooting? Are the teams that perform those functions now capable of performing those functions in the future? It seems to me that the here-to-there for functional, evolving and reliable systems in the real world has been elided and become simply "a player to be named later".
Why 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.
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.
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.
I have no particular religious preference for a language. One uses what one feels is appropriate.
But, let's say this effort is a complete success. What's next?
Can all the maintainers of the c codebase move over to maintaining (forward) the Rust codebase. Surely there'll be some friction, and losses to friction.
What about deployments, monitoring, support and trouble-shooting? Are the teams that perform those functions now capable of performing those functions in the future? It seems to me that the here-to-there for functional, evolving and reliable systems in the real world has been elided and become simply "a player to be named later".
Not the same as:
https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
Although I could see them benefitting.
Have you heard about fil-c?
It's an interesting option for infrastructure that's not performance critical.
I agree with Domen Kožar that I want an extern "fil-c" in Rust. https://domenkozar.com/2026/08/13/i-want-extern-fil-c/
What about it?
Why 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.
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.
> 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.