It's not only the uutil's Rust Coreutils project seeing performance improvements but some increased healthy competition now from GNU Coreutils. With today's release of GNU Coreutils 9.11 the wc command is up to multiple times faster and even cat can be up to 15 times faster.

Commands such as cat and yes are now up to 15x faster! This is achieved thanks to leveraging zero-copy I/O on Linux with modern systems. The 15x faster claim was made in the GNU Coreutils 9.11 release announcement as:

"throughput improved 15x from 11.6GiB/s to 175GiB/s on a Power10 system."

Or on an older AMD Ryzen 7 3700X system, cat went from 1.67GiB/s to 9.03GiB/s for another big win.

Other performance wins include shuf - being up to 2x faster by using unlocked stdio, wc -l being up to 4.5x faster on hosts with Arm NEON instructions, and wc -m being up to 2.6x faster for processing multi-byte characters.

GNU Coreutils 9.11 also now makes the cut / nl / unexpand / expand commands multi-byte character aware. The cut command also supports more options for better compatibility, and the date command now parses dot delimited dd.mm.yy formats.

Downloads and more details on this exciting GNU Coreutils 9.11 update via savannah.gnu.org .