Sylvestre Ledru, a Debian developer, writes about the Rust coreutils rewrite and rebuilding the Debian archive with Clang.
HN links it for the Rust coreutils project in Debian, including FOSDEM slides explaining the motivation and benchmarks showing some utilities already faster than GNU.
Some utils are faster already, and they are working on cp and mv progress bars.
From the fosdem 2023 presentation:
https://sylvestre.ledru.info/presentations/coreutils-fosdem-2023/#99
==
Example #1:
$ hyperfine -r 10 \
"target/release/coreutils sort -R shakespeare.txt > shakespeare.txt.rand; \
target/release/coreutils sort shakespeare.txt.rand > /dev/null" \
"sort -R shakespeare.txt > shakespeare.txt.rand; \
sort shakespeare.txt > /dev/null"
é
[...]
Summary
'target/release/coreutils sort -R shakespeare.txt > shakespeare.txt.rand; target/release/coreutils sort shakespeare.txt.rand > /dev/null' ran
4.63 ± 0.19 times faster than 'sort -R shakespeare.txt > shakespeare.txt.rand; sort shakespeare.txt > /dev/null'
To be fair, we can be slower too
Example #3:
$ hyperfine "seq 18446744073708551615 18446744073709551615 | factor" \
"./target/release/coreutils seq 18446744073708551615 18446744073709551615| ./target/release/coreutils factor"
[...]
'seq 18446744073708551615 18446744073709551615 | factor' ran
5.08 ± 0.01 times faster than './target/release/coreutils seq 18446744073708551615 18446
===
Redox-OS is rewriting the BSD coreutils in Rust for their own OS.
https://github.com/redox-os/coreutils
I wonder what the most efficient and usable alternative operating system tradeoff choice tradeoff would be, perhaps mesalock (a linux with userspace tools compiled with rust)
syllable, haiku, redox, menuet64/kolibri, serenity, icaros desktop, postmarketos,…
>The GNU coreutils are still the very best you can get.
I don't understand this statement then, have you heard of this https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/GUIDE.md
It sounds like you want bash POSIX support and it to be default before you would use them. The error nobody else replicated, and its stable enough to be included in debian. https://sylvestre.ledru.info/blog/2021/03/09/debian-running-on-rust-coreutils
One fun recent development in 2021: https://sylvestre.ledru.info/blog/2021/03/09/debian-running-on-rust-coreutils
> tldr: Rust/coreutils ( https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/ ) is now available in Debian, good enough to boot a Debian with GNOME, install the top 1000 packages, build Firefox, the Linux Kernel and LLVM/Clang.
The slides are linked, at https://sylvestre.ledru.info/presentations/coreutils-fosdem-2023/#69 (for example), if you don't want to watch a video which discusses why they're doing it.