Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings
Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings
You're viewing part of a thread.
Show Context
52 comments
-
whereas Rust binaries are statically linked by default, meaning that the binary is actually self-contained.
rust still produces larger binaries even if you compare it to static C binaries.
Take for example busybox, you can compile all of it as a single 1.2 MiB static binary that provides 395 utilities including wget.
Meanwhile the uutils static musl binary is 12 MiB and only provides 115 utilities.
-
That's not a fair comparison at all. Busybox is specifically optimized for size, and to accomplish that, leaves out a large number of GNU compatibility features; uutils is designed to mimic GNU as closely as possible, and I'm assuming that the binary you're looking at is not the "small-release" build. Just to see what that looks like, I've built it that way now and that puts it under 7 MiB; still much larger than busybox, but it shows how much the optimization choices matter.
-
That’s not a fair comparison at all. Busybox is specifically optimized for size, and to accomplish that, leaves out a large number of GNU compatibility features
Such as? busybox provides a nice interactive shell,
awk,bc,wgetand much more. I know GNU awk has a lot more features than posix awk but awk is not part of the uutils anyways.busybox also implements
[[from bash, none of this is provided by uutils or coreutils.EDIT: busybox also provides grep while the uutils/coreutils don't.
I’ve built it that way now and that puts it under 7 MiB; still much larger than busybox, but it shows how much the optimization choices matter.
I'm assuming this uses
-Oswhich means performance hit, (iirc busybox also uses -Os so it is fair comparison), still we are looking at 7x larger binary.-
From the busybox "about" page:
The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts.... BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind.
Neither of these is true for uutils, which is specifically targeting perfect GNU compatibility. I don't think there is a comparable Rust project for minimized utilities.
-
The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins
Note: GNU cousins, not GNU coreutils.
GNU awk, GNU grep, bash, wget, etc will give you a lot more features than the busybox equivalents. However the uutils nor coreutils implement those features at all.
If anything the comparison is not being fair to busybox because busybox implements a lot more utilities.
-
Busybox
lshas 26 flags. GNUlshas 60.-
fair, in that case the comparison is even since busybox provides a shell, awk, grep, wget among other 395 utils, uutils it is 115.
-
I really don't think these are clearly comparable. I would rather see two more similar projects with comparable functionality that are both attempting to optimize for program binary size.
-
Well if you still insist. Just went to check how big is the GNU coreutils as a single static binary, it is 2.3 MiB in size
check it out: https://pkgs.pkgforge.dev/repo/bincache/x86_64-linux/coreutils/nixpkgs/coreutils/
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
52 comments