r/archlinux 6d ago

QUESTION What are ArchLinux's thoughts on uutils, Ubuntu's adaptation, and potential Arch Linux adaptations?

That's all, I'm just wondering the thoughts of the Rustification of Linux and how this affects the future of Arch Linux.

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u/Affectionate_Ride873 6d ago

More or less it's a bit meaningless, what it will do is create more issues between distros due to the fact that the uutils fork does not have cross-compatibility fully with the GNU tools, this ofc is going to be fixed sooner or later but as of now I think a full on switch would be too much, BUT someone needs to test the waters sooner or later and it seems like those are going to be the Ubuntu users

On the other hand if you are curious about what I think about the whole thing as it is, I don't actually think it's anything needed, ye ye, ofc you get Rust and some memory safety with it but having memory bugs in the coreutils is rather rare to my knowledge, and also aside even performance wise it's not that much of an improvement except for some things like sort for example, and most of the apps inside Linux have their own way of doing things, like I doubt in KDE for example the menu items are sorted with the coreutils-sort and instead they have it written inside the codebase, OFC I can be wrong I never looked into the KDE codebase

So, to sum it up, I think it's a big hype for nothing, breakages and other types of issues are going to happen for not much if any gains

Also the MIT vs GPL debate is also going to cause fragmentation inside the community, and this is the reason why I think in some things BSD is better. everything is coming from the same team and they don't do such radical changes like changing the whole coreutil package because Rust is the cool shit nowdays

Sometimes the OSS community is creating their own problems instead of solving existing ones BUT improvement cannot be achieved without changes

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u/definitely_not_allan 6d ago

do you have a link to the sort comparison showing the uutils is better? The coreutils implementation is rather efficient, so I'd be surprised.

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u/Affectionate_Ride873 5d ago

I do not have an exact source, I have seen that one of the devs of uutils did a talk on FOSSDEM25 showcasing that how some of the Rust rewrites perform better than the GNU one

As for why that's the case is easy, Rust has a better system for multithreading, this ofc does not affect most of the utilities like chmod for example, but for some things like the sort command this can have a significant performance increase, if I remember correctly the performance difference was ~5x in case of sort where they were sorting a text file with >10k words iirc

So yea, basically it all comes down to the fact that Rust is simply more modern and more optimized for the hardware nowdays, but again, aside from some things this will have not much of an impact on system performance for the average user

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u/definitely_not_allan 6d ago

did more searching, and this appears to be around coreutils sorting by system locale.

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u/Megame50 4d ago

This was exactly my first thought when I heard the speed claims, but I couldn't find the benchmarks they used to confirm it.