Rust-Written Coreutils v0.0.18 Released With Improved GNU Compatibility

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Rust-Written Coreutils v0.0.18 Released With Improved GNU Compatibility

One of several notable open-source projects to rewrite key Linux software components with the memory-safety-focused Rust programming language is uutils as an alternative to GNU Coreutils. Released this weekend was uutils v0.0.18 that continues to enhance compatibility with the upstream GNU Coreutils programs...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Coreutils-uutils-0.0.18

[evasb]

uutils exist for the same reason toybox exists.

[RahulSundaram]

uutils exist for the same reason toybox exists.

Toybox is a BSD licensed alternative to BusyBox written in C. The goals are according to the project are simplicity and smallness. The focus of uutils is Rust and cross platform. Not the same thing.

[uid313]

But Rust binaries are statically compiled and quite big, will this mean that it will be chgrp 100 mb, chown 100 mb, chmod 100 mb, cp 100 mb, dd 100 mb, df 100 mb, ln 100 mb, etc?

[mdedetrich]

But Rust binaries are statically compiled and quite big, will this mean that it will be chgrp 100 mb, chown 100 mb, chmod 100 mb, cp 100 mb, dd 100 mb, df 100 mb, ln 100 mb, etc?

You can dynamically link. Rust binaries (if thats what you are implying), its just not the default.

[bug77]

But Rust binaries are statically compiled and quite big, will this mean that it will be chgrp 100 mb, chown 100 mb, chmod 100 mb, cp 100 mb, dd 100 mb, df 100 mb, ln 100 mb, etc?

They're big if you write "hello, world" programs.
I don't remember exactly, but the overhead from the standard library is something like 2-5MB. That's a flat cost and you can even cut into that if you want.
That said, it will be much better once std-aware-cargo is figured out: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/refe...html#build-std

[roughl]

But Rust binaries are statically compiled and quite big, will this mean that it will be chgrp 100 mb, chown 100 mb, chmod 100 mb, cp 100 mb, dd 100 mb, df 100 mb, ln 100 mb, etc?

Similar to busybox you can just use one binary with several symlinks to it (which make it behave differently depending on which symlink is used). With the community/uutils-coreutils package on ArchLinux the binary is 31MB.

[Chewi]

Yeah, 100MB is a bit of an exaggeration. For debug builds, maybe, but that's not unique to Rust. I wrote a program that could connect to MS Access with ODBC and write XML using the serde library, which weighed in around 5MB. That's still a lot for ls, but it doesn't have to be static, as others have said.

[hotaru]

They're big if you write "hello, world" programs.
I don't remember exactly, but the overhead from the standard library is something like 2-5MB. That's a flat cost and you can even cu into that if you want.

$ pacman -Qi uutils-coreutils | grep '^Installed Size'
Installed Size : 32.26 MiB
$ pacman -Qi coreutils | grep '^Installed Size'
Installed Size : 15.95 MiB

over twice as big as GNU coreutils, and that's with uutils using the "compile everything into a single binary like busybox" hack.

[ssokolow]

over twice as big as GNU coreutils, and that's with uutils using the "compile everything into a single binary like busybox" hack.

Among other reasons, because it does more stuff. For example, if that's built with default options, an assert failure will get you stack unwinding and, optionally, a traceback as a built-in feature of the binary, not something you have to have been running it under GDB for.