4 ms·

extremely naive to think a new language added perf over C++. its obviously a side effect of rewriting a 20+ yrs codebase under an updated architecture vision fr

by gcb0 9y ago

extremely naive to think a new language added perf over C++. its obviously a side effect of rewriting a 20+ yrs codebase under an updated architecture vision from scratch.

nbaksalyar 9y ago
Fearless concurrency is very important for performance though. You can read more on that here: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-In-Firefox-Quantum.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-I...
Rusky 9y ago
In the case of Firefox, that new architecture was impossible without Rust. Mozilla tried and failed twice.
arcticbull 9y ago
It's not that it's impossible in C++ just that it's impractical to write large-scale solutions with a complex threading model with the "don't screw up" model C++ uses. The Rust compiler provides what amount to built-in unit tests with every build pass that allow you to fearlessly write code without data races. This in turn allows the new architecture you're referencing.
- mrighele 9y ago
  I don't think you need a complex threading model. The browser showed that you can get good interaction with single-threaded environment as long as you 1) can offload computation to other processes (web services, in the case of the browser, or more recently, workers) through message-passing and 2) such interaction can be performed asynchronously (i.e. while you wait for the result you can continue with the rest). I think such kind of approach could be adopted by emacs without having to rewrite everything from scratch. Taking advantage of this would require of course rewriting a good amount of code (both elisp and C), but it could be done bit by bit over the course of a long time.
  - arcticbull 9y ago
    I think the Stylo developments show that it's not entirely true. Yes, you can get good performance from single-threaded models, and you can get better performance with threading. I'm also a huge advocate of not rewriting things, which is why Rust's C interop allows for incremental re-development of legacy codebases in a reasonable way.
    - cies 9y ago
      > you can get better performance with threading Indeed. I think mrighele is talking about server side web app performance, which is a much higher level game and because a lot is stateless allows scale-out + loadbalancing to achieve resource utilization maximization. When writing hi-perf systems (like a browser), this is a very different game. In this game threading is a tool you need to make sure all cores utilized.

by gcb0 9y ago

extremely naive to think a new language added perf over C++. its obviously a side effect of rewriting a 20+ yrs codebase under an updated architecture vision from scratch.

nbaksalyar 9y ago

Fearless concurrency is very important for performance though. You can read more on that here: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-In-Firefox-Quantum.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-I...

Rusky 9y ago

In the case of Firefox, that new architecture was impossible without Rust. Mozilla tried and failed twice.

arcticbull 9y ago

It's not that it's impossible in C++ just that it's impractical to write large-scale solutions with a complex threading model with the "don't screw up" model C++ uses. The Rust compiler provides what amount to built-in unit tests with every build pass that allow you to fearlessly write code without data races. This in turn allows the new architecture you're referencing.

mrighele 9y ago
I don't think you need a complex threading model. The browser showed that you can get good interaction with single-threaded environment as long as you 1) can offload computation to other processes (web services, in the case of the browser, or more recently, workers) through message-passing and 2) such interaction can be performed asynchronously (i.e. while you wait for the result you can continue with the rest). I think such kind of approach could be adopted by emacs without having to rewrite everything from scratch. Taking advantage of this would require of course rewriting a good amount of code (both elisp and C), but it could be done bit by bit over the course of a long time.
- arcticbull 9y ago
  I think the Stylo developments show that it's not entirely true. Yes, you can get good performance from single-threaded models, and you can get better performance with threading. I'm also a huge advocate of not rewriting things, which is why Rust's C interop allows for incremental re-development of legacy codebases in a reasonable way.
  - cies 9y ago
    > you can get better performance with threading Indeed. I think mrighele is talking about server side web app performance, which is a much higher level game and because a lot is stateless allows scale-out + loadbalancing to achieve resource utilization maximization. When writing hi-perf systems (like a browser), this is a very different game. In this game threading is a tool you need to make sure all cores utilized.