Why is there no Rust-port of GNU `sort` yet?

92 points croemer

I love the performance (and UI) improvements of many Rust ports of classic unix tools, like \ripgrep\\, \sd\\, etc.

I was getting frustrated with slow GNU \sort\\ on a 600M line/10GB file and looked for a Rust alternative but to my surprise couldn't find any here: https://github.com/sts10/rust-command-line-utilities

Is there a fundamental reason why no one has written that sort of tool yet? What makes it hard or not worth it?

The fastest I could figure out with existing tools was something like:

LC_ALL=C parsort -S 5% -t $'\\t' -k 2n,2n --compress-program zstd

but it still takes 15-20min on a 32GB RAM M1 mac.