this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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I do not like this attitude towards uutils. phoronix makes a very click baity title, and comments shit on uutils, rust and ubuntu.
last time it was "extremely slow" (17x), and by the time most people reported it, a pull request had been made and merged which brought the sha function within 2x of gnu version. not ideal, but definitely not reporting worthy.
then it was sort function can not sort big files, which came from a artificial benchmark of a 4 gigabyte file with single line all consisting of character 'a' (not sure if it was a or 0 or something, but that is not relevant). gnu version finished in ~1 sec, and the rust version could not. you can not sort a single line, it is already sorted. so there is some check which uutils is missing, which could be easily added, but no, we must shit on uutils and rust because they are trying.
In this case, some md5 errors happen, but apparently problematic part is not md5, but dd (actual bug report - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/makeself/+bug/2125535).
I am not saying uutils is a perfect project, but gnu coreutils are nearly 4 decades old, where as uutils are less than 1 decade (yes the project did not start last year). There are bugs which need to be ironed out, and testing it in a non lts distribution is the best way to do that.
Sure, but is there an actual reason to be switching?
Uutils doesn't seem to be an evolution of coreutils, but a functional clone. What advantage do we get with that?
Note: I have pull requests against uutils so I'm by no means anti-Rust or against the project. But I personally would not replace coreutils with it.
it is an evolution in several senses. one is a more modern language. this in of itself is not useful, but in this case, rust ecosystem provides a lot of good libraries to use. so instead of depending on glibc or some other library, or hand rolling your own stuff, you can statically compile in good libs. this allows for potentially leaner code.
At some places they are intentionally deviating from gnu variant, for example, uu-cp,mv have a -g graphical flag, which gnu variants did not accept in, because they consider themselves feature complete.
(i read this part later, and just noow realising you are a better dev then me, and thank you).
feel free to do as you like.