Almost 14 years ago, I wrote a [small utility, named tarsum, to calculate checksums on files inside a tar archive. It was useful for verifying data inside backups. Recently, I decided to rewrite it in Rust. It’s available from https://github.com/guyru/tarsum.
Installation using cargo is straight forward:
$ cargo install --git https://github.com/guyru/tarsum
Surprisingly, testing on a large tar archive (recent Linux tarball, 1.3 GB), the performance of both Python and Rust implementation is very similar.