The Rust Coreutils project, which aims to provide a full, modern Rust implementation of the GNU Core Utilities — the essential command-line tools found on every Linux and Unix-like operating system — has announced the release of version 0.4.
Notably, the project’s growing maturity has already led to real-world adoption in some Linux distros, such as Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka” and AerynOS, both of which now utilize Rust Coreutils for select system utilities.
Version 0.4 brings this release a step closer to achieving full GNU Coreutils compatibility. According to devs, the latest test results show 544 passing tests, up from 532 in the previous 0.3 release — an increase that raises total compatibility to 85.8%, while failures dropped from 68 to 56.
The detractors of this project portray it like it’s a far-off pipe dream to be a drop-in replacement for GNUtils. Meanwhile, it’s still a relatively young project that already has 85% compatibility. I think we can do it. Lol.
My only issue is the permissive license, but I’m still hope they do well :3
This is my take as well. I’m extremely disappointed they only went with a temporarily open license instead of a proper one, but using MIT is unfortunately to be expected from the Rust ecosystem for whatever reason…
temporarily open?
MIT is an extremely weak license when it comes to defending free/libre rights; e.g. it allows proprietary forks. i.e. companies stealing the code, making their own bullshit corpo product and not even releasing the source code back
Same.
Same.
Still completely unhinged to ship it in your distro before it’s fully compatible cough Ubuntu cough
Yep already broke a couple of things and we had to roll back.
Wrong. Have to start adoption somewhere, and doing it in a non-LTS release is a great move.
Last I checked Ubuntu was not an unstable mess of a rolling release, but a distro people rely on for stability.
Their normal non-LTS versions are still considered production ready and acting that rash has only solidified my negative opinion of them more…
If you’re expecting stability for any Ubuntu release, that went out the window when Canonical started forcing Snaps.
But non-LTS Ubuntu releases have always been a testing ground for less-than-stable changes. uutils is just one of them, and the only way to make them stable is to see how they’re being used in the wild.
I would expect the last 10% to take 90% of the work though. There are a lot of rough edges that just work weird. There is also a question of what is useful to get from that last 10%, or what should be done different despite being incompatible. (BSD utils are also an option to be compatible with instead)
Rust coreutils has 17,000 commits and is 12 years old.
Yeah, but it didn’t get any serious development until 2021.
Check for yourself: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/graphs/contributors
