The Ubuntu 25.10 transition to using some Rust system utilities continues proving quite rocky. Beyond some early performance issues with Rust Coreutils, breakage for some executables, and broken unattended upgrades due to a Rust Coreutils bug, it’s also sudo-rs now causing Ubuntu developers some headaches. There are two moderate security issues affecting sudo-rs, the Rust version of sudo being used by Ubuntu 25.10.
Rust has features that are not directly related to memory safety, but introduce paradigmatic and ergonomic improvements that help writing correct logic more often. Features like sum types (powerful enums) and type classes (traits, how generics are implemented) quickly come to mind. Hygienic macros and procedural macros are also very powerful features.
Sometimes the two aspects (language feature and memory safety) come together. For example, the
SendandSynctraits is the part of the type system that contributes to implementing thread safety.So it’s not all just about (im)mutability, lifetimes, and the borrow checker, the directly relevant safety features.
Also, the tooling and the ecosystem are factors the value of which can not be understated.
Well said. I personally enjoy using a systems-level language with a handful of functional programming features. I also enjoy the support for async runtimes and other concurrency features (channels).
Rust allows me to get away from more boring (to me) languages (e.g. JS/TS, Java, Kotlin).