Ubuntu 25.10’s transition to using Rust Coreutils in place of GNU Coreutils has uncovered a few performance issues so far with the Rust version being slower than the C-based GNU Coreutils. Fortunately there still are a few weeks to go until Ubuntu 25.10 releases as stable and upstream developers are working to address these performance gaps.
Rust is great, but might it be a bit premature to replace the venerable coreutils with a project boasting version number 0.2, which I imagine reflects its author’s view on its maturity?
Version is just a number, just like age. (of Rust, of course)
A major version of 0 isn’t necessarily any statement regarding the projects maturity, it can also be a hack with semantic versioning. Normally, any change that is not fully backwards compatible requires you to increment the major version, but if the major version is 0, you may only increase the minor version. Because of this, many projects stay at the 0.x.y versions, so they don’t need to release version 2.0.0, 3.0.0, 4.0.0 and so on just because of minor but breaking changes as many users might expect significant new features from that version steps.
They don’t need to use semantic versioning. I doubt coreutils itself uses it, though I admit I haven’t checked. Actually I think semantic versioning is less popular in practice than it looks like.
For a set of tools to that completely replaces another one, announcing a 1.0 version would be a message that the developers think the project has actually reached its initial goals. “0.2” does not.