The release of uutils coreutils 0.2.0 (Rust Coreutils) has been published, which develops an analog of the GNU Coreutils package, written in Rust. The coreutils package includes over a hundred utilities, including sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, and ls. The project's aim is to create a cross-platform alternative implementation of Coreutils, capable of running on Windows, Redox, and Fuchsia platforms among others.
Rust Coreutils is used in the AerynOS (Serpent OS) and Apertis distributions and will also be the default in the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release. Unlike GNU Coreutils, the Rust implementation is distributed under the permissive MIT license rather than the copyleft GPL license. Additionally, the same team is developing Rust-based equivalents to the util-linux, diffutils, findutils, and procps utility sets, as well as the sed and login programs.
In the new version of Rust Coreutils:
- The package has been deemed fully ready for production use in Ubuntu. All issues preventing the default transition of Ubuntu to Rust Coreutils have been resolved.
- Support for localization and internationalization has been added. An infrastructure for maintaining message translations in different languages has been established. Locale parameters have been taken into account when formatting output, and translations of error messages into various languages have begun. The Fluent localization system, developed by Mozilla and used in Firefox, has been implemented to support multilingualism.
- Unicode support has been added. Unicode characters, including emojis, can now be used in processing content and parameters, for example, as field separators: 'echo "🍔🍟🥤" | cut -d"🍟" -f1'.
- Performance optimizations have been made for the tr, sort, and cat utilities. The performance of the tr utility has been increased by 15 times—previously it was 9.8 times slower than GNU tr, and now it is 1.58 times faster.
- Compatibility with the reference test suite for GNU Coreutils has been improved, successfully passing 538 tests (up from 522 in the last version), while 52 (65) tests failed, and 27 (31) tests were skipped.
- Compatibility with GNU Coreutils has been improved for the date, du, fmt, ls, and sort utilities.
- Capabilities have been expanded, issues have been resolved, and missing options have been added for the utilities basenc, basename, cat, chmod, chown, cksum, cp, split, date, dd, du, echo, env, expr, factor, fold, hashsum, head, install, ln, logname, ls, mkdir, mkfifo, mktemp, more, mv, nice, nl, od, pr, printf, pwd, realpath, rm, shred, sort, stat, stdbuf, stty, sync, tail, tee, timeout, touch, tr, uname, unexpand, uptime, users, and who.
Source: opennet.ru
