Josh Bressers

I had a chat on #OpenSourceSecurity with @sylvestre about his Rust coreutils work

Replacing coreutils with Rust is one of those things that I love as a way to improve security but also keep a project fresh in the modern age

I learned a ton from this disucssion

https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-03-rust-coreutils-sylvestre-ledru/

Rust coreutils with Sylvestre Ledru

Josh talks to Sylvestre Ledru about the Rust coreutils project. We’ve been using GNU coreutils for decades now, and the goal of Rust coreutils is to rewrite these utilities in Rust. The primary reason isn’t security, it’s to modernize the code and attract new contributors. Sylvestre discusses with quite pleasant relationship with the GNU coreutils developers, some of the challenges in the project. What Ubuntu using this by default meant, and also gives us some things to watch for in the future. It’s a super fun discussion about why Rust is not only awesome, but also the future.

Open Source Security
Mar 2 at 4:02pmWeb
Show threadStylusMar 2

@joshbressers @sylvestre

A question I'd love to see answered (and I didn't in a short skim of this article, which I plan to read more closely later): As the work towards "bug compatibility", have the uutils folks been finding gnu coreutils bugs and how has the process gone for them when making reports at coreutils...

I did find some evidence that uutils work has led to the addition of new test cases in coreutils which is very helpful! https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2025-10/msg00052.html

And some folks are at least appealing to uutils behavior when reporting coreutils bugs https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2025-05/msg00003.html

However, I didn't find anything that I could instantly recognize as uutils-the-project finding and reporting bugs in coreutils...

[PATCH] tests: basenc: add a test for bounded memory operation

Show threadJosh BressersMar 2

@stylus @sylvestre

I don't recall us discussing finding any GNU coreutils bugs, but Sylvestre did talk about how the Rust coreutils and GNU coreutils teams are friendly and work together on things

Show threadAdMar 6

@joshbressers @sylvestre

Very interesting discussion !
As someone who is not familiar with rust this was quite insightful, and it did pique my interest on looking deeper in the language, past the quite unfriendly looking syntax :')

Thanks to you both !

Show threadJosh BressersMar 6
@Admax @sylvestre Thank you for the kind words!