The project uutils coreutils 0.8.0 (Rust Coreutils) has recently been published. This project aims to develop an analogue of the GNU Coreutils, but written in Rust. Coreutils consists of over a hundred utilities such as sort, cat, chmod, chown, and ls. The main goal of this project is to create a cross-platform alternative implementation of Coreutils that can run on platforms like Windows, Redox, and Fuchsia.
Rust Coreutils comes enabled by default in the Ubuntu 25.10 release and is utilized in distributions like AerynOS (Serpent OS) and Apertis (developed by Collabora). Unlike the GNU Coreutils, the Rust implementation is distributed under the permissive MIT license rather than the GPL copyleft license. The same team of developers is also working on analogues of other utility sets written in Rust such as util-linux, diffutils, and procps.
In the latest versions of Rust Coreutils, the compatibility with the GNU Coreutils reference test suite has reached 94.74%. The project has optimized the performance of utilities like dd, ls, sort, wc, and even expanded support for assembling in the WebAssembly format and using the WASI interface in more than 70 utilities. Moreover, several improvements and additions have been made to utilities like cat, chown, cp, and sort.
The team developing Rust Coreutils has also reduced the amount of unsafe code in certain utilities and enhanced the performance of various functions. More details about the project and its updates can be found on their official blog.