The project uutils coreutils 0.7.0 (Rust Coreutils) has been released, aiming to develop an alternative to the GNU Coreutils package in Rust. This project offers over a hundred utilities, including commonly used functions like sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, and ls. The goal is to create a cross-platform implementation that can run on various platforms such as Windows, Redox, and Fuchsia.
Rust Coreutils is now included by default in the Ubuntu 25.10 release and is utilized in distributions like AerynOS (Serpent OS) and Apertis (developed by Collabora). In contrast to GNU Coreutils, the Rust implementation is distributed under the MIT license, rather than the copyleft GPL license. Furthermore, the development team is also working on analogues of other utility sets like util-linux, diffutils, findutils, procps, acl, sed, and login, all written in Rust.
The latest version of Rust Coreutils boasts a compatibility level of 94.59% with the GNU Coreutils reference test suite. While 629 tests were successfully completed, 23 tests failed, and 13 tests were missed. Notably, improvements in compatibility were observed in utilities like date, fmt, kill, ptx, numfmt, and cksum.
Updates in the new versions of Rust Coreutils include faster implementations of rustc-hash hashes in various utilities, optimized handling of ASCII characters for improved performance, and accelerated operations like number-to-string conversion in the nl utility. Additionally, memory allocation operations have been optimized in several utilities, leading to faster speeds in du and shuf. Various utilities have also addressed issues related to crashes and unsafe libc calls have been replaced with secure bindings from the nix crate package.