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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 n

by 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.

by 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.