coreutils was a category error: they took a set of tools which were not very exposed to memory safety errors and rewrote them in a language which does nothing to prevent the kind of logic errors coreutils has suffered from (mostly races around file operations). It’s like complaining that an airbag didn’t save you after driving into a lake.
In contrast, ffmpeg is exactly the sweet spot for a memory-safe language with those complex decoders operating on data which is often untrusted. I wouldn’t suggest a project of that scale lightly but it’s at least a near-perfect fit on the problem domain.
I would say it’s the opposite. coreutils is core utils, you cannot write shell scripts without them, they are widely and almost unavoidably used in trusted environments. They are also relatively simple.
With ffmpeg, anyone who knows anything about secure application development in the past 20 years knows that it is a huge security tarpit and throwing it untrusted inputs in trusted environment is asking to be owned. You thoroughly sandbox that shit. That’s true for all untrusted media conversion, but absolutely with ffmpeg.
> you cannot write shell scripts without them, they are widely and almost unavoidably used in trusted environments.
True.
That doesn't make them "very exposed to memory safety errors".
The coreutils rewrite was shit because of the license change. Most of the other founding ideas were also bad as you say, but the license change was absolutely a much worse signal. Just a bunch of people rolling over and showing big corps their belly. And for what? So they can be more exploited by people that treat them like cattle.
Rust does not do "nothing" to prevent logic errors. On the contrary, its strong type system makes them much less likely than in C.
Also security isn't the only reason to prefer Rust to C.
But I do agree ffmpeg would see a much bigger benefit from being written in Rust.