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> The most surprising thing for me is how unintuitive it is to optimize Rust code given that it’s honestly hard to find a Rust project that doesn’t loudly striv

by Arcuru 4y ago

> The most surprising thing for me is how unintuitive it is to optimize Rust code given that it’s honestly hard to find a Rust project that doesn’t loudly strive to be “blazingly fast”. No language is intrinsically fast 100% of the time, at least not when a mortal like me is behind the keyboard. It takes work to optimize code, and too often that work is guess-and-check. I get the feeling that a lot of Rust projects claim to be "blazingly fast" just because they are written in Rust, and not because they've made any attempts to actually optimize it. I rarely see any realistic benchmarks, and the few times I've looked deeply into the designs they are not implemented with execution speed in mind, or in some cases prematurely optimized in a way that is actively detrimental [1]. Personally I think it's because so many of the new Rust programmers are coming from scripting languages, so everything feels fast. I don't have any problems with that, but I'd advise anyone seeing a "blazingly fast" Rust project to check if the project has even a single reasonable benchmark to back that up. [1] https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/ https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/

mcqueenjordan 4y ago
https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep https://github.com/rust-lang/hashbrown https://github.com/rust-lang/hashbrown https://github.com/briansmith/ring https://github.com/briansmith/ring https://github.com/rust-random/rand https://github.com/rust-random/rand Lot of Rust programmers also coming from C, C++, and Go btw.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Good examples, but one of those languages is not like the others, no matter how well it tries to blend in.
burntsushi 4y ago
So wait, are you complaining that Rust projects advertise themselves as "blazingly fast" but actually aren't? Or are you complaining that not all Rust projects are fast? If it's the former, I don't think uutils advertises itself as "blazingly fast." And if it's the latter, then that... kind of seems unreasonable?
- Arcuru 4y ago
  The former, that some projects say "it's blazingly fast because it's in Rust" but don't seem to have any benchmarks. And admittedly I do agree that uutils is not really a good example.
  - burntsushi 4y ago
    Can you give any good examples? Surely there are some people that advertise their projects as fast but actually aren't, or at least aren't in some cases, whether they be written in Rust or anything else. (Even in ripgrep's case, of which I have published benchmarks, GNU grep is still sometimes faster.) But are there any substantial programs with such false advertising? It's hard to qualify what "substantial" means, but perhaps one could start with "is available in Debian" as a starting point. Although it seems you aren't necessarily complaining about false advertising, but rather, missing benchmarks. Most programs, regardless of advertising, don't publish carefully curated benchmarks. I myself have advertised Rust's regex crate as "fast" (albeit not "blazingly fast," I am not one for such flowery language), but I have never published any benchmarks. Of course, benchmarks exist and others can run them, but they are more for internal development than public consumption. Much benchmarking proceeds by an ad hoc nature. I'm not even aware of such venerable programs as GNU grep published benchmarks either, for example. To be clear, I agree it would be nice for programs to publish benchmarks, flowery advertising or not. But solid benchmarks are incredibly difficult to do. Have you ever published any? It takes enormous effort. Yet, I would excuse the words "blazingly fast" if at least some ad hoc benchmarks were run and at least some people are able to reproduce them, at least in common cases. I think my bottom line here is that you seem to be complaining about a pattern, but I'm not entirely sure it is warranted.
mustache_kimono 4y ago
> the few times I've looked deeply into the designs they are not implemented with execution speed in mind, or in some cases prematurely optimized in a way that is actively detrimental [1]. I'm not sure citing uutils/coreutils as an example is fair. I love that project. I learned Rust contributing to that project, however, as the blog entry you cite itself notes: > I saw the maintainers themselves mention that a lot of the code quality isn’t great since a lot of contributions are from people who are very new to Rust I'm sure plenty of my slow code is still in `ls` and `sort` and that's okay?
Jarred 4y ago
“blazing fast” often means “I want to say it’s fast but I’ve never benchmarked it”

by Arcuru 4y ago

mcqueenjordan 4y ago

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep https://github.com/rust-lang/hashbrown https://github.com/rust-lang/hashbrown https://github.com/briansmith/ring https://github.com/briansmith/ring https://github.com/rust-random/rand https://github.com/rust-random/rand Lot of Rust programmers also coming from C, C++, and Go btw.

kaba0 4y ago
Good examples, but one of those languages is not like the others, no matter how well it tries to blend in.

burntsushi 4y ago

So wait, are you complaining that Rust projects advertise themselves as "blazingly fast" but actually aren't? Or are you complaining that not all Rust projects are fast? If it's the former, I don't think uutils advertises itself as "blazingly fast." And if it's the latter, then that... kind of seems unreasonable?

Arcuru 4y ago
The former, that some projects say "it's blazingly fast because it's in Rust" but don't seem to have any benchmarks. And admittedly I do agree that uutils is not really a good example.
- burntsushi 4y ago
  Can you give any good examples? Surely there are some people that advertise their projects as fast but actually aren't, or at least aren't in some cases, whether they be written in Rust or anything else. (Even in ripgrep's case, of which I have published benchmarks, GNU grep is still sometimes faster.) But are there any substantial programs with such false advertising? It's hard to qualify what "substantial" means, but perhaps one could start with "is available in Debian" as a starting point. Although it seems you aren't necessarily complaining about false advertising, but rather, missing benchmarks. Most programs, regardless of advertising, don't publish carefully curated benchmarks. I myself have advertised Rust's regex crate as "fast" (albeit not "blazingly fast," I am not one for such flowery language), but I have never published any benchmarks. Of course, benchmarks exist and others can run them, but they are more for internal development than public consumption. Much benchmarking proceeds by an ad hoc nature. I'm not even aware of such venerable programs as GNU grep published benchmarks either, for example. To be clear, I agree it would be nice for programs to publish benchmarks, flowery advertising or not. But solid benchmarks are incredibly difficult to do. Have you ever published any? It takes enormous effort. Yet, I would excuse the words "blazingly fast" if at least some ad hoc benchmarks were run and at least some people are able to reproduce them, at least in common cases. I think my bottom line here is that you seem to be complaining about a pattern, but I'm not entirely sure it is warranted.

mustache_kimono 4y ago

> the few times I've looked deeply into the designs they are not implemented with execution speed in mind, or in some cases prematurely optimized in a way that is actively detrimental [1]. I'm not sure citing uutils/coreutils as an example is fair. I love that project. I learned Rust contributing to that project, however, as the blog entry you cite itself notes: > I saw the maintainers themselves mention that a lot of the code quality isn’t great since a lot of contributions are from people who are very new to Rust I'm sure plenty of my slow code is still in `ls` and `sort` and that's okay?

Jarred 4y ago

“blazing fast” often means “I want to say it’s fast but I’ve never benchmarked it”