Okay, so I was curious enough to check... I can install NetBSD on an emulated VAX (opensimh), run
pkgin install coreutils
and those binaries do in fact work. I can't seem to find documentation of whether they run tests on every build, but I'm going to tentatively take that as a strong signal that GNU coreutils is still portable across more machines than even Linux can run on.
> I'm going to tentatively take that as a strong signal that GNU coreutils is still portable across more machines than even Linux can run on
And I'm saying -- yes, if "Does it compile?" portability is a value that you care about, the GNU version is probably your version. But what if the Q is (as it was): "Is Rust (llvm?) supported on all platforms Linux targets?"
Then -- I think you need to dig more carefully into what you mean by "support" of non-standard platforms, and why it might be important to you. Would say -- we can move our entire stack to an emulated PDP-11 because Linux and GNU coreutils seem to compile? My guess is no. For lots of reasons, but one reason is "It compiles"/"Seems to work" is not a good measure of support.
