tokei VS coreutils

Whenever I find an interesting project on GitHub, I usually clone the repository and run tokei to check how many lines of code it has. It gives me a rough idea of the project's scale and complexity. (Subjective, of course!)

[16] Tokei (時計)

So If we would only count code and not comments, it is only 9489 LoC Rust. Which would be about 0.03% and if we take all lines and not only LoC it would be around 0.05%

[0] https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b401b621758e46812da...

thirdly: found this (https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei) and wanted to analyze languages used on my system, didn't see a package manager (apt) for it that I had. So i installed cargo via apt-get rustup. Added the bin folder to $PATH via PATH=$PATH:~/.cargo/bin. But did not make it permanent. And stupidly rand tokei on "/", realizing how long and unhelpful that would be killed it. Then ran it in a dump folder with some very nested repo dumps, and tons of wolfram.nb files. After killing that too, and attempting to kill via system monitor. Still have two of those as zombie processes.

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