min-sized-rust VS coreutils

This is a good guide on building small Rust binaries: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

This talks about going to extreme lengths on making the smallest Rust binary possible, 400 bytes when it was written, https://darkcoding.net/software/a-very-small-rust-binary-ind...

The thing is, you lose a lot of nice features when you do this, like panic unwinding, debug symbols, stdlib… for kernel and some embedded development it’s definitely important, but for most use cases, does it matter?

Oh it was 137, haha. I will link you to this older comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29408906

See also https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

Are you sure? If so then this is awesome news, but I'm a bit confused; the commit in that min-sized-rust repo adding `build-std` to the README was merged in August 2021: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust/pull/30

Are you saying that at that point the feature still hadn't "landed in Rust nightly" until recently? If so then what's the difference between a feature just being available in Rust nightly, vs having "landed"?

Rust binaries are by default nowhere close to 500MB. If they are not small enough for you, you can try https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust. By avoiding the formatting machinery and using `panic_immediate_abort` you can get about the size of C binaries.

A useful reference: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

That must be without stripping. Also there are ways to reduce binary size. See e.g. [min-sized-rust](https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust). I've gotten stripped binaries of small cli utils less than 400KiB without doing anything special, less than 150 KiB by customizing profile settings and compressing with upx, and less than 30 KiB by replacing the std with the libc as the link shows. Haven't tried with fltk though...

This is not quite what you're asking, but it does also address the underlying concern: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

I think that is the goal of uutils.

https://uutils.github.io/

If this rewrite is indicative of other rewrites, we'll see a license change from GPL [1] to MIT.

"Differences with GNU are treated as bugs." - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils#goals

Wouldn't it be annoying though, to have to keep things bug-for-bug compatible on a green-field project? That priority may be the first compromise, and divergence is inevitable.

Thinking of what if coreutils were ported to C#; what would folks think then? If the reaction would be the same, different, or ambivalent.

[1] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils?tab=GPL-3.0-1-ov-file

>> For me, anything that isn’t a drop-in replacement for the OG tools isn’t worth the friction.

"The uutils project reimplements ubiquitous command line utilities in Rust. Our goal is to modernize the utils, while retaining full compatibility with the existing utilities. We are planning to replace all essential Linux tools."

https://uutils.github.io/

uutils is being adopted in Ubuntu 25.10:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/19/ubuntu_2510_rust/

I mentioned this on reddit, but AFAIK, the uutils project doesn't yet support locales: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/3997

I'm not any more a fan of POSIX locales than the next person[1], but AIUI, that seems a likely requirement for uutils to be used in a distro like Ubuntu.

I'd be curious how they plan to address this. At least from my perspective, unless uutils has already been designed to account for locales from the start (I don't know if it has), it seems likely that a significant investment of time will be required to add support for it.

[1]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02...

Related: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils "Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils"

Not that it should represent the rubicon of when to/not to rewrite code, but when you do, you do trade one set of bugs for a new set of bugs: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues