The release of the uutils coreutils 0.8.0 (Rust Coreutils) project has been published, developing an equivalent to the GNU Coreutils package, written in the Rust language. The coreutils package includes over a hundred utilities, including sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, and ls. The goal of the project is to create a cross-platform alternative implementation of Coreutils, capable of running on Windows, Redox, and Fuchsia platforms.
Rust Coreutils is enabled by default in the release of Ubuntu 25.10 and is used in the AerynOS (Serpent OS) and Apertis (developed by Collabora) distributions. Unlike GNU Coreutils, the Rust implementation is distributed under the permissive MIT license instead of the copyleft GPL license. Additionally, the same team of developers is working on Rust implementations of the util-linux, diffutils, findutils, procps, and acl utilities, as well as the sed and login programs.
In the new version of Rust Coreutils:
- The compatibility level with the reference test suite for GNU Coreutils reached 94.74% (up from 94.59%). A total of 630 tests were successfully executed, which is one more than in the previous version (629). 21 tests failed (down from 23), while 14 tests were skipped (up from 13).
- In the utilities cat, df, wc, tty, tsort, tail, touch, date, mkdir and uucore, the crate package nix has been replaced with rustix. The amount of unsafe code in the utilities hostname, logname, who, and nice has been reduced.
- Performance optimizations have been conducted for the utilities dd (+45%), ls, sort, wc, cat, tee, numfmt (+3%), and pr. The size of the executable files true, false, and echo has also been reduced.
- Support for building in WebAssembly format and using the WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) has been added to over 70 utilities, including ls, head, cat, cp, mv, sort, and tail. A demo online service has been prepared with an interactive terminal where uutils utilities can be run.
- Capabilities have been expanded, issues resolved, and missing options added for the utilities cat, chown, cksum, cp, cut, date, dd, df, env, expand, expr, factor, head, install, ln, ls, mkdir, nice, numfmt, od, pr, sort, split, stdbuf, stty, sync, tee, timeout, touch, tr, true, tsort, tty, wc, yes.
Source: opennet.ru
