this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 2 days ago by cm0002@piefed.world to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

From the busybox "about" page:

The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts.... BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind.

Neither of these is true for uutils, which is specifically targeting perfect GNU compatibility. I don't think there is a comparable Rust project for minimized utilities.

[–] Samueru_sama@programming.dev 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins

Note: GNU cousins, not GNU coreutils.

GNU awk, GNU grep, bash, wget, etc will give you a lot more features than the busybox equivalents. However the uutils nor coreutils implement those features at all.

If anything the comparison is not being fair to busybox because busybox implements a lot more utilities.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Busybox ls has 26 flags. GNU ls has 60.

[–] Samueru_sama@programming.dev 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

fair, in that case the comparison is even since busybox provides a shell, awk, grep, wget among other 395 utils, uutils it is 115.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I really don't think these are clearly comparable. I would rather see two more similar projects with comparable functionality that are both attempting to optimize for program binary size.

[–] Samueru_sama@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago

Well if you still insist. Just went to check how big is the GNU coreutils as a single static binary, it is 2.3 MiB in size

check it out: https://pkgs.pkgforge.dev/repo/bincache/x86_64-linux/coreutils/nixpkgs/coreutils/