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Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@piefed.world to c/linux@programming.dev

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[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

That's not a fair comparison at all. Busybox is specifically optimized for size, and to accomplish that, leaves out a large number of GNU compatibility features; uutils is designed to mimic GNU as closely as possible, and I'm assuming that the binary you're looking at is not the "small-release" build. Just to see what that looks like, I've built it that way now and that puts it under 7 MiB; still much larger than busybox, but it shows how much the optimization choices matter.

[–] Samueru_sama@programming.dev -2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

That’s not a fair comparison at all. Busybox is specifically optimized for size, and to accomplish that, leaves out a large number of GNU compatibility features

Such as? busybox provides a nice interactive shell, awk, bc, wget and much more. I know GNU awk has a lot more features than posix awk but awk is not part of the uutils anyways.

busybox also implements [[ from bash, none of this is provided by uutils or coreutils.

EDIT: busybox also provides grep while the uutils/coreutils don't.

I’ve built it that way now and that puts it under 7 MiB; still much larger than busybox, but it shows how much the optimization choices matter.

I'm assuming this uses -Os which means performance hit, (iirc busybox also uses -Os so it is fair comparison), still we are looking at 7x larger binary.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

From the busybox "about" page:

The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts.... BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind.

Neither of these is true for uutils, which is specifically targeting perfect GNU compatibility. I don't think there is a comparable Rust project for minimized utilities.

[–] Samueru_sama@programming.dev 0 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins

Note: GNU cousins, not GNU coreutils.

GNU awk, GNU grep, bash, wget, etc will give you a lot more features than the busybox equivalents. However the uutils nor coreutils implement those features at all.

If anything the comparison is not being fair to busybox because busybox implements a lot more utilities.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Busybox ls has 26 flags. GNU ls has 60.

[–] Samueru_sama@programming.dev 0 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

fair, in that case the comparison is even since busybox provides a shell, awk, grep, wget among other 395 utils, uutils it is 115.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 3 points 9 hours ago

I really don't think these are clearly comparable. I would rather see two more similar projects with comparable functionality that are both attempting to optimize for program binary size.