Canonical and its developers are busy bringing Rust into Ubuntu to carefully but purposefully oxidize it. The upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release will swap the long-standing GNU Coreutils with its Rust counterpart (uutils), and it has already replaced sudo with the Rust-based sudo-rs.
These are bold moves that put Ubuntu among the first major Linux distributions to lean so heavily on Rust for critical system components. It all looks promising, with Rust bringing memory safety, fewer chances of nasty bugs, and a cleaner codebase overall.
However, the journey hasn't been without its challenges.
Some Hurdles to Cross
For instance, the cksum utility initially delivered slower performance compared to its GNU counterpart when tested on hyperfine. Fortunately, this issue has been addressed in a recent patch.
Similarly, the sort command has been reported to fail to provide an output on very large single-line files, and this issue is still under investigation by the uutils developers.
Meanwhile, most Rust utilities are already running smoothly. The base64 utility has been optimized and now outperforms the GNU version, showing that with careful tuning, Rust-based tools can match or exceed their C counterparts.
Most of these issues are expected to be resolved before the Ubuntu 25.10 release, allowing developers enough time to polish critical utilities.
Plus, addressing these early hiccups now will set a stronger foundation for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS next year, where the Rust-based Coreutils (uutils) should become a more polished, reliable part of the system.
In the end, Canonical's Rust push in Ubuntu is ambitious, and while there are bumps along the way, it shows a clear dedication to safer and more modern system tools for the long term.
The entire episode reminded me of the incident where a company was paying developers to improve their Rust code performance to match their C counterpart.
Sourav Rudra
Via: Phoronix
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