this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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I do not like this attitude towards uutils. phoronix makes a very click baity title, and comments shit on uutils, rust and ubuntu.
last time it was "extremely slow" (17x), and by the time most people reported it, a pull request had been made and merged which brought the sha function within 2x of gnu version. not ideal, but definitely not reporting worthy.
then it was sort function can not sort big files, which came from a artificial benchmark of a 4 gigabyte file with single line all consisting of character 'a' (not sure if it was a or 0 or something, but that is not relevant). gnu version finished in ~1 sec, and the rust version could not. you can not sort a single line, it is already sorted. so there is some check which uutils is missing, which could be easily added, but no, we must shit on uutils and rust because they are trying.
In this case, some md5 errors happen, but apparently problematic part is not md5, but dd (actual bug report - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/makeself/+bug/2125535).
I am not saying uutils is a perfect project, but gnu coreutils are nearly 4 decades old, where as uutils are less than 1 decade (yes the project did not start last year). There are bugs which need to be ironed out, and testing it in a non lts distribution is the best way to do that.
I think that people are negative towards rust utils, not because of rust or attachment to an old software but because they are not licensed under GPL or another copyleft license. Even if they become faster and more stable in the future, this is a flaw that will not be ignored.
Tell me one time when GNU coreutils being GPL has had any effect whatsoever.
I am not sure how to answer that. Are you asking me to give you an example that the GNU coreutils were not used in a closed sourced s/w?
No, an example where a modification to coreutils was open sourced by a commercial company that might otherwise not have.
The GPL has been reasonably effective in some cases like the Linux kernel and KHTML at getting companies to release their modifications. But I don't see that as being significant for coreutils because a) most companies would have zero need to modify them, and b) they could just use the BSD versions if they really wanted.