That’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
Such as? busybox provides a nice interactive shell, awk, bc, wget and much more. I know GNU awk has a lot more features than posix awk but awk is not part of the uutils anyways.
busybox also implements [[ from bash, none of this is provided by uutils or coreutils.
EDIT: busybox also provides grep while the uutils/coreutils don’t.
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.
I’m assuming this uses -Os which means performance hit, (iirc busybox also uses -Os so it is fair comparison), still we are looking at 7x larger binary.
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.
Such as? busybox provides a nice interactive shell,
awk,bc,wgetand much more. I know GNU awk has a lot more features than posix awk but awk is not part of the uutils anyways.busybox also implements
[[from bash, none of this is provided by uutils or coreutils.EDIT: busybox also provides grep while the uutils/coreutils don’t.
I’m assuming this uses
-Oswhich means performance hit, (iirc busybox also uses -Os so it is fair comparison), still we are looking at 7x larger binary.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/