The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts…
BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind.
Neither of these is true for uutils, which is specifically targeting perfect GNU compatibility. I don’t think there is a comparable Rust project for minimized utilities.
The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins
Note: GNU cousins, not GNU coreutils.
GNU awk, GNU grep, bash, wget, etc will give you a lot more features than the busybox equivalents. However the uutils nor coreutils implement those features at all.
If anything the comparison is not being fair to busybox because busybox implements a lot more utilities.
I really don’t think these are clearly comparable. I would rather see two more similar projects with comparable functionality that are both attempting to optimize for program binary size.
From the busybox “about” page:
Neither of these is true for uutils, which is specifically targeting perfect GNU compatibility. I don’t think there is a comparable Rust project for minimized utilities.
Note: GNU cousins, not GNU coreutils.
GNU awk, GNU grep, bash, wget, etc will give you a lot more features than the busybox equivalents. However the uutils nor coreutils implement those features at all.
If anything the comparison is not being fair to busybox because busybox implements a lot more utilities.
Busybox
lshas 26 flags. GNUlshas 60.fair, in that case the comparison is even since busybox provides a shell, awk, grep, wget among other 395 utils, uutils it is 115.
I really don’t think these are clearly comparable. I would rather see two more similar projects with comparable functionality that are both attempting to optimize for program binary size.
Well if you still insist. Just went to check how big is the GNU coreutils as a single static binary, it is 2.3 MiB in size
check it out: https://pkgs.pkgforge.dev/repo/bincache/x86_64-linux/coreutils/nixpkgs/coreutils/