🦀 The Sad Reality of Rust Adoption

If you’ve been hanging around developer socials, then you’ve obviously heard the heated debate recently about Rust’s adoption by established software, especially in Coreutils and Git.

Some devs are thrilled, while others are not-so happy about the move especially in battle-tested projects. The internet has, naturally, turned it into a meme war.

Some people are convinced Rust adoption is all a master-planned, 100% orchestrated takeover, sacrificing decades of “perfectly secure” code for the sake of new language syndrome.

If you’ve missed it, Ubuntu 25.10 tag named “Questing Quokka” is shipping with a Rusty version of Coreutils (aka the thing that makes ls, cat, and rm actually do stuff).

Meanwhile, Git maintainers are considering introducing Rust into the world’s most important source control system.

Here’s the thing, GNU Coreutils has had its share of security flaws (yep, even your beloved sort had a vulnerability).

• Writing flawless, memory-safe C is like trying to juggle knives while blindfolded, you can do it, but eventually, you’re going to lose a finger. Rust doesn’t guarantee faster, but it gives devs fewer ways to accidentally set their code on fire. And in production land, “less on fire” is usually a win.

Some critics argue Rust rewrites are just devs chasing shiny new toys. But the reality? Most big companies don’t throw out tech unless it solves something painful, and memory safety is a very expensive pain.

Rust’s been around for a decade now, and seeing it slide into projects like Coreutils and Git isn’t about novelty. It’s about maintainability, fewer CVEs, and less weekend times spent fixing segfaults.

Will Rust kill C? Nah. The world has too much C for that. But rewriting critical parts in Rust makes sense where it counts.