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⇱ Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 Released With Faster base64: Outperforming GNU's base64 - Phoronix


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Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 Released With Faster base64: Outperforming GNU's base64

Written by Michael Larabel in Programming on 9 September 2025 at 04:43 PM EDT. 57 Comments
It was just a few days ago that Rust Coreutils 0.2 released with "massive" performance gains and production-ready Ubuntu support. Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 is out today and is delivering a few more enhancements -- most excitingly is a faster base64 command that can now outperform the GNU Coreutils version.

Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 was primarily released so soon in order to deliver some important infrastructure fixes for more reliable distribution and deployment across different platforms. A number of the Rust dependencies were updated as part of the process. There are also some fixes like avoiding a panic in stty, fixing cp when copying the current directory to an existing directory, and other fixes.

Catching my intrigue with Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 is improving the performance of its base64 utility, which was done by simply leveraging the base64-simd Rust crate for leveraging SIMD capabilities on modern CPUs.

As outlined in the pull request this brings significant performance improvements for Rust Coreutils' base64 command. In a sample benchmark the previous release took 5.998 seconds while with this new version is down to 3.146 seconds. Taking half the amount of time as before is quite an achievement on its own.

What makes this even more exciting is that it outperforms the base64 command shipped by GNU Coreutils, which came in at a 4.901 second average. The new base64 with Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 is having clear performance advantages over the GNU Coreutils version.

👁 Rust base64 coreutils benchmarks


This change comes from Sylvestre Ledru himself, the lead developer of the uutils effort.

The Rust base64-simd crate supports the likes of SSE4.1, AVX2, AVX-512, ARM NEON, AArch64 NEON, WASM SIMD128 for SIMD across different architectures.

Downloads and more information on the Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 release via GitHub.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.