A Developer is Reimplementing GNU's Core Utilities in Rust

A Rust-based re-implementation of GNU core utilities like cp and mv is "reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses," reports Phoronix:Debian developer Sylvestre Ledru [also an engineering director at Mozilla] began working on uutils during the COVID-19 pandemic and presented last week at FOSDEM 2023 on his Coreutils replacement effort. With uutils growing into increasingly good shape, it's been packaged up by many Linux distributions and is also used now by "a famous social network via the Yocto project...." The goals with uutils are to try to create a drop-in replacement for GNU Coreutils, strive for good cross-platform support, and easy testing. Ledru's initial goals were about being able to boot Debian, running the most popular packages, building key open-source software, and all-around it's been panning out to be a great success.... [M]ore performance optimizations are to come along with other work for compatibility against the GNU tools and implementing some still missing options in different programs

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