habitat VS coreutils

And many more such as Scaleway, Oxide, Fuchsia, MeiliSearch, Vector, embark, Chef, BBC...

https://github.com/habitat-sh/habitat written by Chef devs

Personal anecdote: Habitat was developed as a sort of application deployment / configuration management tool in Rust, and the architecture there is roughly equivalent to an ECS. I found it a joy to work with and work on. Not sure if it's fundamentally a better software pattern, but it at least meshes with my brain better than how most OO-style software is laid out.

https://github.com/habitat-sh/habitat

Ah yes, std, that famous crate that is unusable for systems programming. God forbid anyone do any "systems" programming that uses std.

I suppose there's some merit in having another option. But I also immediately thought why not just contribute to https://github.com/uutils/coreutils.

I like the idea but I think that https://github.com/uutils/coreutils likely is the better option going forward if you want to avoid GNU coreutils. Writing code that works on all platforms seems better than to port from one system to another, in my opinion

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

MIT license

I think you’re conflating different projects.

There are projects that aim for a better user experience, with better command line interface, defaults, performance and UI. These are of course breaking changes and the programs can’t be used as drop in replacement. Some examples are

- ls => exa (https://github.com/ogham/exa)

- grep => ripgrep (https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep)

- cat => bat (https://github.com/sharkdp/bat)

- tree => broot (https://github.com/Canop/broot)

The person you’re replying to was speaking of a different project - uutils (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils). These are drop in replacements with identical interfaces (modulo bugs).

LLVM, while open source, is not at all GPL or a GNU project. Regardless of what you might think of the guy personally, history has by now clearly proven RMS right on certain points over and over again - so having a GNUish rust toolchain suddenly makes rust a whole lot more attractive for use for some people. Consider the fact there's a maturing coreutils rust replacement now. Coreutils may not be high profile, but is rather important, like its name might suggest. Rust has clear advantages over C and C++ on some axes at the level of systems tools - but, see, now even if such rust-ified rewrite stuff starts "winning", it can all be built by GNU's official compiler GCC, and GNU projects can themselves use rust etc.

that comes preinstalled too, as of Windows 10 build 1803 according to people online. and i was referring to alternate coreutils impls such as uutils/coreutils. also, cygwin is still a thing.

I don’t think it was accidental. There’s a long thread in the uutils repo with a discussion (slash flame war) about the license choice: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/834

Link to the actual implementation: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

I love these re-implementations of things. Technology advances by the continued reinvention of the wheel, and even if some efforts end up being of merely didactic interest, it is still important to make them. Coreutils is one of the pillars of our civilization, and thus it should be re-implemented several times on many programming languages.

Looking at the source code, it is impressive that this re-implementation is essentially complete! Look at this: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/tree/main/src/uu It's only missing some obscure and fringe things.

An important feature of GNU coreutils is, somewhat sadly, not reproduced by this re-implementation: the copyleft license of the original implementation. This takes out some freedom of the users. For example, If I use GNU "ls", I know that I can always look at its source code and change it to my whim (or hire a programmer to change it for me). However, if I use uutils "ls", this is not necessarily the case, for it may be a re-distribution by some middle-men that has modified it slightly and does not provide the source code. I suppose that the removal of this freedom is accidental, because it was a nice thing.