authors = ["Sylvestre Ledru"]

As we expand the scope of the project, we envision a future where Rust becomes the backbone of essential Linux, Unix, and macOS system tools. Our focus will be on improving security, ensuring long-term maintainability, and optimizing performance for both modern and legacy systems. Through the uutils umbrella, we aim to create a more secure, efficient, and scalable alternative to the traditional GNU tools.

Rust offers several advantages over C/C++, particularly in terms of memory safety, concurrency, and performance. By eliminating common security issues such as null pointer dereferences and buffer overflows, Rust allows us to build tools that are inherently safer. Its modern compiler tooling also enables us to optimize performance without sacrificing code safety, ensuring that our utilities can handle the demands of modern computing environments while remaining easy to maintain.

As with any large-scale reimplementation, there are challenges to overcome. Porting complex utilities from C to Rust requires careful consideration of edge cases and platform-specific behaviors. Additionally, ensuring full compatibility across Linux, Unix, and potentially macOS environments presents unique challenges. However, these challenges also offer opportunities for growth and innovation, allowing us to rethink and refine core system utilities for modern needs. Rust's modern design gives us the chance to improve both security and performance while maintaining cross-platform compatibility.

This year, as part of our ongoing commitment to enhancing and expanding Rust-based tools, we had the privilege of mentoring three students during Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024. Their work exemplifies the project's momentum and showcases the contributions of the next generation of developers:

3. **Krysztal Huang** worked on implementing the `procps` suite, which includes utilities like `slabtop`, `top`, `pgrep`, `pidof`, `ps`, `pidwait`, and `snice`. This project involved cross-platform support and optimization of performance, focusing first on Linux implementations with plans to extend to other Unix systems in the future.

These students made significant contributions to the Rust coreutils project, demonstrating our continued dedication to open-source development and our belief in Rust as the foundation for the future of system tools. The GSoC projects are a testament to our vision of building a sustainable, high-performance toolchain for the Linux/Unix world, ensuring its evolution and security for years to come.

We are always looking for contributors who are passionate about system-level programming and Rust. Whether you're experienced with GNU utilities or just learning Rust, your contributions will be invaluable to this project. You can get involved by picking up good-first issues, reviewing code, or even helping us test new features across various platforms. The [uutils GitHub organization](https://github.com/uutils) has all the information you need to get started. You can also sponsor the project through [GitHub Sponsors](https://github.com/sponsors/uutils).