Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderRust is a great choice for systems programming it'd seem. Esp considering that a well-tested, battle-hardened code-base like SQLite faces problems [1] solely due to the nature of the language its written in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312918
Genuine question: since these are core utils, and probably used billions of times every day, is anyone actually going to switch to this version? I see that the intention is for this to be a drop-in replacement, but some options and behaviours are still different. To clarify, I'm not intending this as a negative comment. It's an impressive project, and aiming for cross-platform sharing of scripts seems a worthy goal. The graph of progress against the GNU test suite is…
Note GNU coreutils has a good test suite which just calls out to the various tools from shell and perl scripts. It should be easy enough to run this implementation through it. More effort goes into the coreutils tests than the code. One of the hardest parts of coreutils is keeping it working everywhere, including handling that buggy version of function X in libc Y on distro Z. That's handled for GNU coreutils by gnulib, which currently has nearly 10K…
2014, 208 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882211 2016, 490 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11337399
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 4
- Total points
- 1415
- Total comments
- 1318
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-11-29 | Uutils is an attempt at writing universal CLI utils in Rust | steveklabnik | 3 | 0 |
| 2014-06-12 | Cross-platform Rust Rewrite of the GNU CoreutilsFirst breakout | doppp | 299 | 208 |
| 2016-03-22 | Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutilsBest thread | yincrash | 548 | 487 |
| 2020-08-26 | Uutils coreutils – GNU coreutils rewritten in safe Rust | ashitlerferad | 1 | 1 |
| 2021-01-11 | Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils | __henil | 3 | 0 |
| 2021-02-15 | Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils | joshlk | 1 | 0 |
| 2021-02-16 | Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils | ibraheemdev | 5 | 3 |
| 2021-02-22 | Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils | ibraheemdev | 1 | 0 |
| 2021-02-24 | Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils | ibraheemdev | 4 | 0 |
| 2021-12-06 | Uutils: an attempt at writing cross-platform CLI utilities in RustHall induction | GhettoComputers | 243 | 314 |
| 2024-01-03 | Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutilsLatest 20+ point return | jcbhmr | 302 | 305 |
| 2026-01-11 | Uutils/coreutils: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils | tosh | 5 | 0 |