Notes on coreutils in Rust
Notes on coreutils in Rust
alexgaynor.net
Notes on coreutils in Rust · Alex Gaynor
With Ubuntu changing to the Rust implementation of coreutils, what does that mean for performance?
13 comments
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Im more concerned about the stupid license
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The performance you're dealing with here is in the tens of milliseconds possibly hundreds if you're lucky. Anyone seriously pursuing this issue from the angle of performance genuinely doesn't understand the deep rooted issues here.
If you're so incredibly hard up for compute time that it's critical for you to squeeze out the extra 1/10 of a second from your system utilities then you need to shut your fucking computer down and go touch grass.
I mean even if this saves you 30 seconds a day 50 weeks a year 5 days a week that's 2 hours per year it's saving you.... I'd rather slow fuck the two hours and get an extra 2 hours of pay.
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I’d take those tens of milliseconds. That shit scales and I’ve seen infra in the scale of millions more-or-less glued together by shell scripts and coreutils/busybox.
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this was me watching some of the cheering when neofetch got archived, people complaining “good, neofetch is too slow” – WTF were you doing with neofetch where speed was a factor?!
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Rust has some big binaries due to static linkage, and the Rust coreutils gets around this Busybox-style, compiling everything into one binary that you hard link to. Pretty neat. The project is easy to build and mess with without installing if you're curious about it. And you could add the build dir to the front of your path if you want to try it out with low risk.
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Why do you think it would affect performance?
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I don't think anyone is relying on performance of coreutils. If you're concerned about performance, you're already writing a program directly, not using a shell script.
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Relying on is perhaps too strong, but I enjoy operations like sort getting faster and I don't know how they've written cp but there's a cp alternative using async IO with io_uring that's almost twice as fast, I'm sure it'd interest people if such optimizations made it into coreutils.
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I think your question is relevant as there are unfortunately plenty of shell scripts out there doing critical batch work. But it won't change the momentum of the Rust push happening right now.
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It is faster, optimization is one of the uutils project's stated goals.
13 comments