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Ubuntu Will Replace GNU Core Utilities With Rust
(tube.archworks.co)
I can finally stop calling it GNU/Linux.
Rust/linux^Rust^
Lust
That's extremely unexpected.
The GNU utils weren't written by Canonical so they were doomed from the start.
Not to worry, they'll ship 'em via snap.
Straight to jail.
I like snap, send me to camp.
Lol, I don't hate snap, I also don't need a sandboxed ls with a 30s startup time.
Oh god no
More likely they will make them dependent on snap so you can't remove snap without breaking the system.
Wait is this their way to break compatibility with old binaries so that you're forced to use snap?
They're steadily climbing the test suit:
The uutils should be compatible so I don't think so
Check out our new Coreutils! (Snap required)
Seriously though I'm just imagining that Coreutils are now going to be dependent on snap.
I don't think so unless they make their own rust core utils.
Is there any actual benefit ?
Code written in Rust has been shown to have significantly fewer security vulnerabilities than code written in C. Distributions like Ubuntu ship a lot of security updates, so by switching to Rust-based utils, they can reduce their workload in the long run.
Ubuntu ship a lot of security updates
After introducing the Pro I don't think so.
There's probably some zero day exploit someone is holding onto until everything is rust and then, bam!. Yeah, that's just silly to think. Just silly.
But looking at the security vulnerability records of gnu coreutils that wasn't really needed. There were like a handful in the last 15 years... So I don't really see a need or benefit here.
It's been proven faster. That's all I personally know.
Nothing except for binary coding can be faster than C I think.
Rust is better for writing multithreaded applications which means that the small amount of utilities that can utilize parallelism receive a significant speedup. uutils multithreaded sort was apparently 6x faster than the GNU utils single threaded version.
P.S. I strongly doubt handwritten assembly is more efficient than modern C compilers.
P.S. I strongly doubt handwritten assembly is more efficient than modern C compilers.
As with everything, it all depends.
When writing super efficient assembly you write towards the destination and not necessarily to fit higher level language constructs. There are often ways to cut corners for aspects not needed, reduction in instructions and loops all based on well designed assembly.
The problem is you aren't going to do that for every single CPU instruction because it would take forever and not provide a good ROI. It is far more common to write 99% of your system code in C and then write just the parts that can really benefit from fine tuned assembly. And please note that unless you're writing for an RTOS or something crazy critical on efficiency, its going to be even less assembly.
In large applications maybe not, but in benchmarks there can be a perfectly optimized assembly
Of course, for hot paths or small examples it is, but I doubt it's feasible or maintainable to write a “real” projects like core utilities in assembly.
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My simple assembly program can rum circles around compilers. As long as something is small it is possible to optimize better than a C compiler.
Compilers have a lot of chalenges to even compile, let alone optimize. Just register allocation alone is a big problem. An inherent problem is that the compiler does not know what the program is supposed to do. Humans still write better assembly then compilers.
The one down arrow on the guy you are responding to is from me, just so everybody knows.
This is just wrong, the compiler (and linker) knows exactly what the program does as it has the ENTIRE source code available. Compilers have been so good the last 20 years that it is quite hard to write things faster in assembly/machine code.
One of the harder parts about assembly is keeping track of which registers a subroutine uses and which one is available, as the program grows larger you might be forced to push/pop to the stack all the time. Inlining code is also difficult in assembler, the compiler is quite adept at that.
It might have been true up until the 90s, but then compilers started getting so good (Watcom) there was rarely any point to write assembler code, unless there was some extremely hardware specific thing that needed to be done
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Multithreading isn't a true efficiency benefit. I was talking about different things there.
Fortran
I'm not sure why people are downvoting you, since Fortran is known to be extremely performant when dealing with multidimensional arrays.
Just security and hype afaik.
No, it isn't just hype. The hype is justified.
Outside of security you have some very really world benefits, like performance gains in various scenarios as well as lots more people willing to contribute and a much better type system (more maintainability).
Well the rust project is MIT licensed, so definitely not.
I thought MIT licensing was a good thing?? What am i missing??
The success of FOSS can in large part be attributed to copyleft licenses like the GPL. Without the protections of copyleft clauses, software just gets exploited by large corporations and end users are locked out. For just one example, if GNU software had used MIT, the entire free router movement (i.e ddwrt, openwrt and co.) would probably not exist today.
See: Free Software Foundation, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc..
Edit: actually, I think by the time of this specific lawsuit, the sources for wrt54g were already released after community pressure, this article details the history a bit better.
Rust is good, rare Ubuntu W. Now stop with the forced use of snaps.
You think this is a win, but is just another step in the enshittification.
What about licences and FOSS?
According to the video it's MIT licence, and they discuss the risk of such a licence vs coreutils usage of the GPL
This worries me indeed.
Archlinux usually is a bit more reasonable. I don’t understand the forcing. Just makes me love it (archlinux) more!
This is the Linux community's Sophie's choice.
Ubuntu continues to show that it's the absolute worst.
To bad no body really uses it (or at least they shouldn't)
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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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