this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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Rust Coreutils 0.4 Boosts GNU Compatibility to 85% (linuxiac.com)
submitted 2 months ago by cm0002@futurology.today to c/linux@programming.dev
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The Rust Coreutils project, which aims to provide a full, modern Rust implementation of the GNU Core Utilities — the essential command-line tools found on every Linux and Unix-like operating system — has announced the release of version 0.4.

Notably, the project’s growing maturity has already led to real-world adoption in some Linux distros, such as Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka” and AerynOS, both of which now utilize Rust Coreutils for select system utilities.

Version 0.4 brings this release a step closer to achieving full GNU Coreutils compatibility. According to devs, the latest test results show 544 passing tests, up from 532 in the previous 0.3 release — an increase that raises total compatibility to 85.8%, while failures dropped from 68 to 56.

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[–] trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 2 months ago (4 children)

The detractors of this project portray it like it's a far-off pipe dream to be a drop-in replacement for GNUtils. Meanwhile, it's still a relatively young project that already has 85% compatibility. I think we can do it. Lol.

[–] HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 2 months ago (2 children)

My only issue is the permissive license, but I'm still hope they do well :3

[–] qweertz@programming.dev 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is my take as well. I'm extremely disappointed they only went with a temporarily open license instead of a proper one, but using MIT is unfortunately to be expected from the Rust ecosystem for whatever reason...

[–] morto@piefed.social 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

temporarily open?

[–] qweertz@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

MIT is an extremely weak license when it comes to defending free/libre rights; e.g. it allows proprietary forks. i.e. companies stealing the code, making their own bullshit corpo product and not even releasing the source code back

[–] morto@piefed.social 1 points 2 months ago

I understand and share the dislike, but the openly released version will remain free, and no one can change it, so don't you think temporarily open is a bit misleading?

[–] qweertz@programming.dev 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Still completely unhinged to ship it in your distro before it's fully compatible cough Ubuntu cough

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 8 points 2 months ago

Yep already broke a couple of things and we had to roll back.

[–] trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wrong. Have to start adoption somewhere, and doing it in a non-LTS release is a great move.

[–] qweertz@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Last I checked Ubuntu was not an unstable mess of a rolling release, but a distro people rely on for stability.

Their normal non-LTS versions are still considered production ready and acting that rash has only solidified my negative opinion of them more...

[–] trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 2 months ago

If you're expecting stability for any Ubuntu release, that went out the window when Canonical started forcing Snaps.

But non-LTS Ubuntu releases have always been a testing ground for less-than-stable changes. uutils is just one of them, and the only way to make them stable is to see how they're being used in the wild.

[–] bluGill@fedia.io 11 points 2 months ago

I would expect the last 10% to take 90% of the work though. There are a lot of rough edges that just work weird. There is also a question of what is useful to get from that last 10%, or what should be done different despite being incompatible. (BSD utils are also an option to be compatible with instead)

[–] patrick@lemmy.bestiver.se -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Rust coreutils has 17,000 commits and is 12 years old.

[–] spartanatreyu@programming.dev 5 points 2 months ago

Yeah, but it didn't get any serious development until 2021.

Check for yourself: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/graphs/contributors