Rust-Based Coreutils 0.0.26 Increases Compatibility With GNU Coreutils

[ZeroPointEnergy]

Memory safety is nice, but I'm somehow concerned that to build this it has almost 300 dependencies. I'm not sure that is a win for security.

[theuserbl]

I have interpolated that line, without adding a saturation curve.
Then it will not be finished this year. But next year it will be.

[bug77]

It's a shame its not compatible with grep. I sometimes find myself needing to look up the options for Ripgrep, for example

grep -o

is

rg --no-line-number --only-matching

or

rg -oN

which is not only longer to type out but I'm going to forget it sometimes.

There is value in tools like Uutils that try to maintain compatibility with their GNU counterparts. I would love to see a grep utility that utilises Ripgreps core while keeping the options the same as GNU's.

I'm not gonna lie, compatibility is nice. But so is ripgrep.

[bug77]

Memory safety is nice, but I'm somehow concerned that to build this it has almost 300 dependencies. I'm not sure that is a win for security.

https://lib.rs/crates/cargo-audit

https://aquasecurity.github.io/trivy/v0.50/

[Quackdoc]

Compatibility and memory safety are cool and all (and memory safety has become a hot topic with the related gnu libc project) but what I'd really like to start seeing is a measurement of whether the rust uutils are leveraging rust's easy multithreading for speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed.

I havent benchmarked uutils for speed, but I have benchmarked the "rust alternatives" things like ripgrep, erdtree etc. and they are usually faster. I wish more were properly syntatically compatible but it's not super important for me

[CommunityMember]

First you need functionality before you can start speeding up functionality.

As I recall, there have been some speed ups reported for some of the use cases.

[wangling]

Although reason tells me that rewriting with rust may improve performance compatibility and maintainability. But some people clamoring to rewrite everything with rust does make me a bit annoyed.

[jacob]

Although reason tells me that rewriting with rust may improve performance compatibility and maintainability. But some people clamoring to rewrite everything with rust does make me a bit annoyed.

I guess it makes sense for an open source project with mainstream appeal to say which language it's written in. Of course with things like Fedora's reproducible build tool that hardly anyone will ever fork or try patching, announcing that it's in Rust just makes me feel "so what?".

But you have to give it to them, it's a brilliantly executed viral marketing campaign. Marketing is important. Rust wouldn't be where it is today without it.

[Quackdoc]

But you have to give it to them, it's a brilliantly executed viral marketing campaign. Marketing is important. Rust wouldn't be where it is today without it.

I wouldn't really say that's true. Rust is a very natural progression for a lot of people. Aside from "getting the name out there" rust would have taken over anyways since memory safe languages are taking over, and rust is IMO the most ergonomic and performant ecosystem around

[jacob]

I wouldn't really say that's true. Rust is a very natural progression for a lot of people. Aside from "getting the name out there" rust would have taken over anyways since memory safe languages are taking over, and rust is IMO the most ergonomic and performant ecosystem around

I'm not an advertising or marketing expert, but my gut feeling is that it only feels natural because people know about it. If people didn't hear about "XYZ is written in Rust", "ABC will be rewritten in Rust" etc. every day, they wouldn't consider it as a real option for their own projects. Rust could very easily have remained another language that's interesting on paper but with little to no industrial relevance if it wasn't deliberately pushed into the spotlight. That they made that effort is a very commendable and positive thing, the days of "if you just make a compiler, they will come" are long gone. Walter Bright, the creator of Dlang, is on record saying that the fact that he wasn't able to better market his language is what he considers his biggest failure.