18KB ls alternative in no_std rust and Libc
Details
- External ID
- 48920811
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- 18KB ls alternative in no_std rust and Libc
- Website domain
- crates.io
- Launched
- July 15, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 23
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7437275985663082
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- gpu compute and acceleration tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- lightweight file listing utility
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While the logic of the `ls` command is conceptually simple, writing a `no_std` Rust binary constrained to 18KB requires low-level systems programming and manual direct libc/syscall interaction.
What it would actually take: The program must be written in Rust without the standard library (`no_std`), disabling default allocators, panic handlers, and unwinding. It requires interfacing directly with POSIX syscalls (`sys_getdents64`, `statx`) and manually formatting terminal output, requiring systems programming expertise to minimize binary size.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: BusyBox, GNU coreutils, Python scripts with glob/pathlib, Plan 9 (9base)
Concerns raised: Only implements small subset of GNU ls functionality, Rust+libc cross-compilation complexity, Space efficiency compared to alternatives, Performance vs. smaller implementation size
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 524 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #139 of 525 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 251 days after the earliest competitor.
- I wrote a ~2KB executable file HTTP file downloader without Libc · hn · 2026-03-29 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Rust but Lisp · hn · 2026-05-09 · 218 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Writing Rust modules for the xv6 kernel · hn · 2025-12-01 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- flashtex · github · 2026-09-12 · 52 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- RustDesk-Suite · github · 2026-09-22 · 81 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Zero deps C++ ASR binary for Linux (0MB idle RAM, no daemons, Unix way) · hn · 2026-06-04 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Ttar 2.4 KB freestanding TAR archiver written in C, no Libc · hn · 2026-06-12 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Hybrid-Transpiler · hn · 2025-12-26 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.52
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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