

As much as I’d love to see Linux become a big player in the market, this article is completely wrong on why Microsoft is selling Windows in the cloud and the ultimate result of it.
My bet is that Windows in the cloud is being developed and will be targeted to enterprise clients that already use similar solutions for having secure environments for their employees, such as Citrix or VmWare solutions, or RDP desktops.
They don’t want to kill the desktop with the cloud, they want to steal market from older enterprise big players and increase their cloud dependency among businesses.

Language isn’t everything. While Rust provides some features and safety that C doesn’t while being roughly equivalent in performance, the algorithms that developers choose will dominate the performance impact on the program.
GNU core utils has decades of accumulated knowledge and optimisation that results in the speed it has. The Rust core utils should in theory be able to achieve equivalent performance, but differences in the implementation choices between one and another, or even something as simple as the developers not having prioritised speed yet and still focusing on correctness could explain the differences that are being reported.