FOSDEM 2023 - Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)

Sylvestre Ledru explains the motivation, challenges, and performance benefits of reimplementing GNU Coreutils in Rust.

Presented at FOSDEM: fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rust_coreutils/ Who doesn't know about ls, chmod or cp? Who isn't using it daily? Coreutils are critical components of any Unix. According to its Wikipedia page, the first versions of cp or chown have been released in November 1971. Almost all Linux distros are based on the GNU implementation.Fast forward today, a community spawned to reimplement the coreutils in Rust. We are able to boot a Debian with it, build Firefox or LLVM, etc.This presentation will explain why we are re-implementing the wheel. But also how we are doing it, share some of the corner cases we have been facing, why we are (sometime) faster, etcWe will also quickly mention the usage of Rust in the Linux kernel. With these two projects, we think that we will see more and more core piece of the Linux ecosystem in Rust.