One thing not mentioned in the link are some performance improvement details.

For example the yes command (generally useful for generating repetitive text):

    $ yes-old | pv > /dev/null ^C
    ... 55.8MiB/s ...
    $ yes-new | pv > /dev/null ^C
    ... 3.44GiB/s ...

Details on that fairly simple change are at http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commitdiff;h...

It's interesting there are so many potential improvements in such widely used tools. For example we also more than doubled the speed of wc -l (by avoiding function call overhead):

    $ yes | pv | wc-old -l ^C
    ... 230MiB/s ...
    $ yes | pv | wc-new -l ^C
    ... 558MiB/s ...

For completeness, we now generate an infinite stream of integers more efficiently too:

    $ seq-old inf | pv > /dev/null ^C
    ... 13.3MiB/s ...
    $ seq-new inf | pv > /dev/null ^C
    ... 497MiB/s ...

p.s. I would have used the new `dd status=progress` feature rather than pv above, though pv gives more accurate values due to its use of splice(2). Something to consider for a future version of coreutils