“Garbage collection” is ambiguous, actually; reference counting is traditionally considered a kind of “garbage collection”. The type you’re thinking of is called “tracing garbage collection,” but the term “garbage collection” is often used to specifically mean “tracing garbage collection.”
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BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•The idea of /usr/sbin has failed in practice1·20 hours agoWhat’s wrong with the explanation given?
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•The idea of /usr/sbin has failed in practice3·1 day ago…the rest of it explains the context, and then briefly says that some people will disagree with the decision, but those people should just use a different distro. What are you complaining about?
To be fair, the drop/dealloc “pause” is very different from what people usually mean when they say “garbage collection pause”, i.e. stop-the-world (…or at least a slice of the world).
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•I must have died and gone to heaven [nushell]21·1 day agoYou could also just alias
find
back to^find
. I don’t use nushell as my daily driver for other reasons, and I agree with the comment above that it’s a bit questionable for them to have a built-in with that name, but I don’t understand why you’d even try out a new shell, let alone one that’s radically different from POSIX-style shells, much less complain online about the shell you just tried, when you’re already happy with the shell you’re using and are not willing to adapt any habits or explore the configuration options to match your needs.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•I must have died and gone to heaven [nushell]4·1 day agoI genuinely can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings3·2 days agoI 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.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings2·2 days agoBusybox
ls
has 26 flags. GNUls
has 60.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings2·2 days agoFrom the busybox “about” page:
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.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings1·2 days agoSure, Old English. But the commenter isn’t writing in old or even middle English.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings4·2 days agoThat’s fine, just please don’t spread misinformation about a language you don’t use.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings3·2 days agoThat’s not a fair comparison at all. Busybox is specifically optimized for size, and to accomplish that, leaves out a large number of GNU compatibility features; uutils is designed to mimic GNU as closely as possible, and I’m assuming that the binary you’re looking at is not the “small-release” build. Just to see what that looks like, I’ve built it that way now and that puts it under 7 MiB; still much larger than busybox, but it shows how much the optimization choices matter.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings6·2 days agoI think you’re making some poorly-researched assumptions.
In the embedded world, there often aren’t “system libraries,” depending on just what you’re targeting. But if, for some reason, you really do want to use libc but not the Rust standard library, you can certainly do that; for instance, here’s a crate that reimplements the Rust standard library’s output and formatting capabilities using libc: https://github.com/mmastrac/rust-libc-print
Rust provides essentially the same memory control as C does. You can also have inline assembly in Rust, just as in C.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings6·2 days agoIf your goal is small binaries, it’s possible to get them with Rust, too: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust
There are a variety of reasons why Rust binaries tend to be bigger unless you follow some of those guidelines, but the biggest one (and actually not something those guidelines recommend changing!) is that C is generally dynamically linked against a system version of the C standard library, whereas Rust binaries are statically linked by default, meaning that the binary is actually self-contained.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings41·2 days agoIt’s actually just English with Greek letters, just as the user above writes in English but uses the þ (thorn) character.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings192·2 days agoΠρεσυμαβλυ, ἰτ ἀλρεαδυ ὐσεδ ΣΙΜΔ, ἀνδ θατ’ς ὁ θε ἐξιστινγ ΓΝΥ ὐτιλιτυ βεατ ῾Ρυστ βυ ἀ φακτορ ὀφ 17ξ.
BatmanAoD@programming.devto Linux@programming.dev•Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings16·2 days agoLooks like it wasn’t even a bug, just a missed opportunity to use SIMD.
That’s fair; Python, Swift, and most Lisps all use or have previously used reference-counting. But the quoted sentence isn’t wrong, since it said no “garbage collection pauses” rather than “garbage collection.”