I can certainly understand it for something like sudo or for other tools where the attack surface is larger and certain security-critical interactions are happening, but in this case it really seems like a questionable tradeoff, where the benefits in this specific case are abstract (theoretically no more possibility of any memory-safety bugs) but the costs are very concrete (incompatibility issues; and possibly other, new, non-memory-safety bugs being introduced with new code).
EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm otherwise perfectly happy that these experiments are being done, and we should all be better off for it and learn something as a result. Obviously somebody has assessed that this tradeoff has at least a decent probability of being a net positive here in some timeframe, and if others are unhappy about it then I suppose they're welcome to install another implementation of coreutils, or use a different distro, or write their own, or whatever.
I'd prefer it if all software was written in languages that made it as easy as possible to avoid bugs, including memory-safety bugs, regardless of whether it seems like it has a large attack surface or not.
I view `uutils` as a good opportunity to get rid of legacy baggage that might be used by just 0.03% of the community but has to sit there and it impedes certain feature adding or bug fixing.
F.ex. `sudo-rs` does not support most of what the normal `sudo` does... and it turned out that most people did not need most of `sudo` in the first place.
OpenBSD has a lot of new stuff throughout the codebase.
No need for adding a bloated dependency (e.g. Rust) just because you want to re-implement "yes" in a "memory-safe language" when you probably have no reasons to.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm otherwise perfectly happy that these experiments are being done, and we should all be better off for it and learn something as a result. Obviously somebody has assessed that this tradeoff has at least a decent probability of being a net positive here in some timeframe, and if others are unhappy about it then I suppose they're welcome to install another implementation of coreutils, or use a different distro, or write their own, or whatever.