Show HN: 18KB ls alternative in no_std rust and Libc

crates.io

23 points·tracyspacy··5 comments

For comparison: GNU coreutils ls 9.4 is 139 KiB on my system.

BusyBox v1.36.1 is 2.1 MiB and has 272 tools which is just about 7.6 KiB per tool, so when it comes to space efficiency BusyBox is probably hard to beat.

The (probably statically linked) 9base-6 Plan 9 ls is 961 KiB.

> BusyBox v1.36.1 is 2.1 MiB and has 272 tools which is just about 7.6 KiB per tool, so when it comes to space efficiency BusyBox is probably hard to beat.

GNU coreutils is also quite happy to build itself all into a single binary. On a sample NixOS box, this binary is 1.5M and lists 106 tools (although that number should be read with a grain of salt since it's at least double listing [ and test).

Not a fair comparison because it only implements a small subset of the GNU ls functionality.

Looks like nice human written rust code, I wonder if for your use case it might have been easier to write a small python script to use glob and pathlib to just add your emojis or note which is a file or dir since that shouldn't be super slow and would be using less space too(assuming you have python on your pi)

thank you. As for python, seems it is preinstalled on pi, I assume option you suggested might be also viable initially, I'm not very experienced in python though. Right now I feel interesting challenge on how small I can go with rust+libc while keeping it cross compiling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com