Since the article emphasizes performance so much, I’d have liked to see some benchmarking of the new core utils against the old, instead of the questionable and unsourced claim that “So far benchmarks have shown time and time again that at best with a lot of optimizations and tweaks Rust can only ever match the performance of C and in most cases it is actually slower.”
I tried adding LC_ALL=C as well as LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 and it didn't make much of a difference outside of BSD cut[0].
The input file to the benchmark is all ASCII text chars (unibyte?) and `choose` does take the safe(r?) route and assume all text is UTF-8 and handle accordingly.
0:
| LC_ALL=C | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 | not setting LC_ALL explicitly
-------------------------------------------------------------------
choose | 110.6 ms | 110.6 ms | 110.8 ms
cut | 813.9 ms | 983.9 ms | 971.7 ms
gcut | 172.8 ms | 172.5 ms | 174.0 ms
ucut | 78.22 ms | 79.39 ms | 79.38 ms