The best discussion I can find for the official reasons for switching is <a href="https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995" rel="nofollow">https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-ox...</a> -<p>> But… why?<p>> Performance is a frequently cited rationale for “Rewrite it in Rust” projects. While performance is high on my list of priorities, it’s not the primary driver behind this change. These utilities are at the heart of the distribution - and it’s the enhanced resilience and safety that is more easily achieved with Rust ports that are most attractive to me.<p>> The Rust language, its type system and its borrow checker (and its community!) work together to encourage developers to write safe, sound, resilient software. With added safety comes an increase in security guarantees, and with an increase in security comes an increase in overall resilience of the system - and where better to start than with the foundational tools that build the distribution?<p>So yes, it sounds like the primary official reason is "enhanced resilience and safety". Given that, I would be interested in seeing the number of security problems in each implementation over time. GNU coreutils <i>does</i> have problems from time to time, but... <a href="https://app.opencve.io/cve/?product=coreutils&vendor=gnu" rel="nofollow">https://app.opencve.io/cve/?product=coreutils&vendor=gnu</a> only seems to list 10 CVEs since 2005. Unfortunately I can't find an equivalent for uutils, but just from news coverage I'm pretty sure they have a worse track record thus far.