High-performance reimplementation of GNU yes, but made at home in Rust.

As I am not very good at writing in Rust, I probably made a lot of subtle mistakes; please submit a PR if you find anything!

The entire codebase is 25 lines long, excluding comments and empty lines. Compare this to the uutils implementation, which has ~161 lines of actual code.

The executables under the Releases tab are built for an x86_64 processor. The Linux builds are statically linked with musl, and the Windows builds are built using mingw-w64.

You can benchmark homemade_yes by running ./homemade_yes | pv -N "Homemade yes" -r -t > /dev/null.

On my build machine (Ubuntu 25.04), it can obtain a throughput of about ~3.5 gigabytes per second, which is comparable to GNU yes (v9.5). On a nice laptop from the past ~5 years and Xubuntu 25.04, I was able to achieve ~4.2 gigabytes per second, whereas GNU yes usually hovered around ~4.0 gigabytes per second.

I have also written a more traditional version of yes at src/bin/posix-only.rs. This version does not include the --version and --help arguments, simplifying the code massively.

In all other respects, it should act roughly identical to the GNU implementation from src/main.rs. If it doesn't, please file an issue so that I can fix it.

Note: I previously referred to this build as being a "POSIX-only" version. This is incorrect; there does not appear to be an applicable POSIX specification here.

Since version v0.3, I have added experimental support for Windows builds.

The Windows builds should behave exactly like their Linux counterparts and have been tested under Wine.

In order to automate the build process, I have written two scripts. These should be executed on a Debian-based machine with Rust installed, optimally in a VM (some metadata, like your username, could get included in the executables).

setup.sh prepares your system for building homemade_yes. To run it, execute curl https://mojavesoft.net/scripts/homemade_yes/setup.sh | bash. It installs ruby, git, and mingw-w64. Afterwards, it then adds the fpm gem for building Debian packages and clones this repository.

Finally, it adds the x86_64-pc-windows-gnu build target so that you can cross-compile for Windows.

build.sh builds the latest version of homemade_yes. First, it updates the repository with git pull to fetch any recent updates. Afterwards, it uses cargo to build the binaries for Windows and Linux. Finally, it creates the deb_package directory and places the final Debian package in it.

To start the build process, run curl https://mojavesoft.net/script/homemade_yes/build.sh | bash.