Rust Coreutils in Ubuntu: Yes, we rewrote /bin/true in Rust — Here’s what really happened

<p>Ubuntu’s plan to “carefully but purposefully oxidise” the distro has given us the perfect playground to see what really happens when you swap decades-old GNU coreutils for their shiny Rust equivalents. Spoiler: everything relies on way more weird flags than you think — and significantly more than the internet’s finest armchair kernel engineers believe.</p> <p>In this talk, I’ll share the fun, the sharp edges, and the truly unexpected lessons from bringing Rust Coreutils (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils ) into Ubuntu: which obscure behaviours scripts secretly depend on, how packaging Essential tools can turn one missing corner-case into a boot failure, what benchmarks actually taught us (as opposed to what Reddit said they would), and how tools like oxidizr (https://github.com/jnsgruk/oxidizr ) let us safely flip between GNU and Rust without breaking the universe.</p> <p>Along the way, we’ll look at some of the best online troll predictions — the “Rust will destroy Linux”, “this is rewriting for the sake of CVs”, and “it will be 100× slower forever” genre — and compare them with what happened in the real world. Some were wrong, some were surprisingly insightful, and some were… educational, in their own way.</p> <p>If you’re curious about modernizing the Linux system, if you enjoy data-driven myth-busting, or if you simply want field notes from the frontier of “C → Rust” rewrites, this session is for you. Links:</p> <p>Ubuntu “oxidising” initiative: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995</p> <p>uutils/coreutils: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils</p>