The cleverness inside coreutils is mostly around choosing effective ways to interface with the kernel, e.g. using copy_file_range() instead of read()/write() to

The cleverness inside coreutils is mostly around choosing effective ways to interface with the kernel, e.g. using copy_file_range() instead of read()/write() to avoid having to copy the data into userspace. It's more a software engineering endeavour instead of computer science.