I ran some tests on the effects of static and dynamic linking. Sorry for the poor table formatting, X doesn't allow for anything better. See the full results at file.soccera.uk/results.json. In short, statically linking coreutils will result in meaningfully faster speeds for many programs. Case │ Static (ms) │ Dynamic (ms) │ Change ───────────────────────────────────────── startup/true │ 0.628 │ 0.934 │ −32.8% startup/printf │ 1.701 │ 2.113 │ −19.5% startup/stat │ 1.838 │ 2.255 │ −18.5% stream/cat │ 2.447 │ 2.758 │ −11.3% text/wc-bytes │ 2.122 │ 2.373 │ −10.6% text/wc-words │ 19.976 │ 19.888 │ +0.4% text/wc-lines │ 5.557 │ 6.031 │ −7.9% text/sort-lexical │ 123.243 │ 122.910 │ +0.3% text/sort-numeric │ 230.126 │ 235.934 │ −2.5% text/uniq │ 33.107 │ 35.148 │ −5.8% text/cut │ 20.693 │ 21.569 │ −4.1% text/tr │ 15.945 │ 16.243 │ −1.8% hash/md5 │ 42.392 │ 44.604 │ −5.0% hash/sha256 │ 15.528 │ 16.094 │ −3.5% hash/blake2 │ 34.814 │ 34.733 │ +0.2% encoding/base64 │ 17.270 │ 17.706 │ −2.5% files/cp │ 8.353 │ 8.995 │ −7.1% files/dd │ 10.434 │ 10.668 │ −2.2% files/ls │ 3.139 │ 3.676 │ −14.6% files/du │ 4.055 │ 4.867 │ −16.7%