FOSDEM 2023 - Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)

Presented at FOSDEM: fosdem.org/2023/schedule/even...
Who doesn't know about ls, chmod or cp? Who isn't using it daily? Coreutils are critical components of any Unix. According to its Wikipedia page, the first versions of cp or chown have been released in November 1971. Almost all Linux distros are based on the GNU implementation.Fast forward today, a community spawned to reimplement the coreutils in Rust. We are able to boot a Debian with it, build Firefox or LLVM, etc.This presentation will explain why we are re-implementing the wheel. But also how we are doing it, share some of the corner cases we have been facing, why we are (sometime) faster, etcWe will also quickly mention the usage of Rust in the Linux kernel. With these two projects, we think that we will see more and more core piece of the Linux ecosystem in Rust.

[@kj_sh604]

I am currently using most of the rust uutils as a coreutils replacement under Arch Linux (via the coreutils-hybrid package)… and I can't tell any significant difference with the uutils and the GNU coreutils (as of version 0.0.19). It just works! and overall I would consider it "stable". I even sometimes forget that I'm not using the GNU coreutils 😅. That's how seamless the uutils are.
I run a lot of shell scripts as daemons in the background since I run a standalone Window Manager and all my scripts still worked perfectly when I switched to using the uutils.
Great work! 👍🏽✨ really excited to see this project continue. I am currently learning rust so that I can hopefully contribute to the project soon 😌

[@rodelias9378]

Great work!!

[@mikysett]

very nice talk!!! but hey born_after_2000

[@SylvestreLedru]

ah ah, yeah, indeed !
I will be more explicit next time I do this presentation ;)