Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

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2021-06-18 01:00:07

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As movement toward memory-safe languages, and Rust in particular, continues to grow, it is worth looking at one of the larger scale efforts to port C code that has existed for decades to Rust. The uutils project aims to rewrite all of the individual utilities included in the GNU Coreutils project in Rust. Originally created by Jordi Boggiano in 2013, the project aims to provide drop-in replacements for the Coreutils programs, adding the data-race protection and memory safety that Rust provides.

Many readers will be familiar with the Coreutils project. It includes the basic file, process, and text manipulation programs that are expected to exist on every GNU-based operating system. The Coreutils project was created to consolidate three sets of tools that were previously offered separately, Fileutils, Textutils, and Shellutils, along with some other miscellaneous utilities. Many of the programs that are included in the project, such as rm, du, ls, and cat, have been around for multiple decades and, though other implementations exist, these utilities are not available for platforms like Windows in their original form.

Collectively, the Coreutils programs are seen as low-hanging fruit where a working Rust-based version can be produced in a reasonable amount of time. The requirements for each utility are clear and many of the them are conceptually straightforward, although that's not to suggest that the work is easy. While a lot of progress has been made to get uutils into a usable state, it will take some time for it to reach the stability and maturity of Coreutils.