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

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.

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.

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.

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:

Ubuntu “oxidising” initiative: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995

uutils/coreutils: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils