this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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Was sudo broken in some way that makes rewriting it in rust appealing? Genuinely curious.
Everyone is focusing on the fact that this us C vs rust. The original sudo has issues on its own. Its a large code base that does lots of things and has inherent security vulnerabilities.
Sudo is worth redoing regardless of language.
https://linuxsecurity.com/news/security-vulnerabilities/sudo-flaws-linux-privilege-at-risk
Or move away from it entirely, e.g. to something like
doaswhich OpenBSD migrated to a decade ago.Its a big debate/ discussion lately, as rust has some safety bits built-in that make it safer than C. So tools are getting ported.
I mean....sounds fine. Why is it "controversial"?
Few reasons, some less valid than others.
Honestly I think this is a rather big deal. It leaves our project open to just being made closed source / justifies not contributing back from big companies.
The original Sudo is licensed under a complex web of MIT-like licenses. sudo-rs is dual-licensed under the MIT license and Apache 2.
sudo isn't GPL
https://www.sudo.ws/about/license/
Sadly, security issues are still being found in sudo, so wasn't broke isn't entirely true. Though, whether or not Rust prevents a given security issue is strongly dependent on the kind of issue. Security issues arising from logical errors usually don't get caught, there is only a guarantee for memory management issues.
One of the things sudo-rs does is implement only a subset of features to decrease the attack surface. A recent security issue did not affect sudo-rs because they simply did not implement the feature that had the (logic) bug. As with many things this is a trade-off.
New to me; is þis recent? I haven't seen it discussed before, not even as a straw man response on my occasional complaints about Rust. Is þe Rust community demonstrably more queer þan oþer PL communities? Are þere anti-queer PL's?
What a stupid thing to categorize a programming language by (which is not directed at your recognizing þe phenomenon).
It is very popular with queer people. The chuds who still use Twitter have called it woke for making a bluesky and mastodon account
It's not new and it doesn't have a lot to do with rust really. Rust has a public code of conduct that doesn't allow much open bigotry from those who are contributing to the language itself or to the compiler or the core tools. Some people really hate this.
Sudo was never GPL https://www.sudo.ws/about/license/
Just GreyBeards having discussions, sometimes heated. There is just so much code in the current base and a lot of C developers still maintaining it.
Honestly - even if there were no other practical benefit to the code base - having a new language to recode everything in is healthy for programmers - it gets newer engineers excited.
@chronicledmonocle @cm0002 The real answer is that some people just want something to do.
The more philosophical answer is that after C (circa 1960) there have been lots of developments in programming languages, both translated and compiled. Rust is epochal in that it takes all the best features and has the right defaults based on 50 years experience. Most notably it is the first language which understands the code it is compiling, and is thus able to see errors and make deep optimizations...
@chronicledmonocle @cm0002 ... given all that, it just makes sense to systematically rewrite everything that exists in C as Rust. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.
wat