Of course! But the problem is much more severe. I can't comment on coreutils, but there are not enough resources for high quality maintenance of the core tool chain. It is completely surprising that effort is wasted for creating new implementations when we do not even have enough resources to properly maintain the existing ones. It is based on the - completely wrong - idea that all the problems we have is from using the wrong language and will magically go away with Rust instead of a fundamental maintenance problem of free software. So we now makes things substantially worse based on this incorrect analysis.
A rewrite in Rust may attract new contributors, thereby aiding maintenance in the coming years.
Especially if you look very long term, as in where the young developers are, you'll see a significant reduction in the amount of people with the ability to write high-quality C. Rust has the benefit that low-quality Rust ist fairly close to high-quality Rust, while low-quality C is a far cry from high-quality C.
Choosing Rust does not necessarily require Rust itself to be better for the task. It can also be the result of secondary factors.
I don't know if this applies to coreutils, but C being technically sufficient does not always mean it shouldn't be replaced.
I don't buy this story. It may attract some people during the hype phase. But in the end, Rust is more complex, so it will make it harder to maintain software. And then, this also only can work if the rewrites completely replace the original (rarely the case), and you do not lose more maintainers than you gain.
It is certainly a lot more complex than C. Whether it codified the things one needs to know is a different question. I would even agree that partially it does and there are aspects I really like about Rust, but I do not believe it matters as nearly as much as some people might think. For example, no complicated super-smart type system will prevent you from adding a CLI option and then not implementing it, breaking automatic updates and backup scripts. But nerds like to believe that this super-smart type system is the solution for out security problems. I can understand this. This is also what I believed 20 years ago.
