RIIR VS wtfiles

It was, imo, inflated by the comments pointing to the RiiR sentiments, not the comments to that effect itself. Even repositories 'collecting' such instances (e.g. https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR) are largely not collections of making anyone to change their own software but just projects that happen to be written in Rust. (these out-of-scope issues are not being tagged appropriately). Overhyped controversy by all sides.

Dunno what news you have missed but there's entire internet brigades dedicated sorely to spam projects with "rewrite it in rust". There's even a repo documenting this.

The OP post in the link references https://transitiontech.ca/random/RIIR (Rewrite it in Rust) as a meme.

Yes, one can hope, but I wouldn't bet on it and I wouldn't suggest to RIIR. I don't want to be that person that pops up uncalled for and asks to Rewrite It In Rust. One might think "Oh it is just one additional issue to the ~2.2k already opened mypy issues" if they have at all realized that there are that many open issues.

It's died down a bit now, but there is/was a non-trivial amount of stupidity from Rust advocates whenever someone ran into a memory problem with C/C++ to "re-write it in rust" or to just rewrite things in general. (IE https://transitiontech.ca/random/RIIR)

Or even better, RIIR the Windows kernel!

What is it with people asking for rust rewrites of Xorg this week? https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/83

The second language is Rust, and I went with that partly because rewriting C in Rust is a meme in itself, and in part because it was much easier to think of how to nicely fix that bug in Rust than it was in C (just add a = to the range to be end-inclusive).

Keep in mind that filesystem paths aren't strings. On Linux, they are raw bytes without any fixed encoding (but usually UTF-8 on UTF-8-based locales), and on Windows, they are sequences of 16-bit codepoints which are expected to be UTF-16 but not validated.

Rust's OsStr is my favorite approach so far. It stores Linux's raw bytes as-is, and stores Windows's possibly-valid UTF-16 as WTF-8. This makes path management "just work", with the ability to operate normally on invalid UTF-8 or UTF-16 paths, and zero-copy conversion from UTF-8/ASCII strings to OsStr (though converting OsStr into UTF-16 requires parsing). (Qt's QString-based file dialogs on Linux fail to convert invalid UTF-8 paths like those in https://github.com/petrosagg/wtfiles into QString, causing Qt-based apps to open/save the wrong paths.)

However there are difficulties in printing an OsStr. For example, a file dialog that shows filenames as raw bytes can't show non-Latin/Unicode characters in a human-readable form, and a file dialog that shows filenames as Unicode strings can't handle invalid Unicode filenames. GTK3 file dialogs show filenames as Unicode strings, and when encountering files with invalid Unicode names, instead displays "file�name.txt (invalid encoding)".

Worse yet, how should a file dialog allow users to rename files? If it's based around byte arrays, the user can't enter Unicode characters directly, and if it's based around Unicode (or a locale-specific text encoding), it can't display existing files with invalid Unicode/etc. in the name (probably not an issue if it allows the user to rename to a valid name), nor allow users to enter invalid Unicode (which is not an issue IMO).