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When rust ≠ performance. a lesson in developer experience

33 points

by suriya-ganesh

2 hours ago

| past

| 5 comments

| suriya.cc

| HN

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notorandit

37 minutes ago

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Of course rust is not performance.

Rust is a programming language. Performance is a mix of programmer's ability, clever design and compiler optimizations.

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jvanderbot

18 minutes ago

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For a long time, Rust == performance because a _lot_ of people moved into Rust that had never really done programming with a concurrency-sane compiled programming language. For them, Rust was synonymous with performance!

Many supporting crates reinforced this. Rayon, Tokio (though not "performant", it was an improvement over naive impl), etc made jumping from hello world to parallel/concurrent execution pretty simple.

But I'm glad to see the downturn on that hype cycle.

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binhex

1 hour ago

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> but because we have this data (file name, etc.) passed back and forth between different layers in the code. we were doing lots of .clone() and db.open() at different layers to fetch the same data. The interesting part for me was that, this change reduced our

Reduced your what? The article seems to be cut off.

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taeric

1 hour ago

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I'm assuming it was going to say lines of code. It is highlighting that more was deleted than added.

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larpingscholar

1 hour ago

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I agree. Though the line count is meaningless as the vibe coded diff has pointless formatting and whitespace changes.

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suriya-ganesh

51 minutes ago

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I wrote that PR and can guarantee you that it was not vibe coded.

the reason why I thought this PR was interesting is that, it only needed ~ 4 lines of real change, everything else was cascades due to that change. and the performance did improve with that "pointless formatting and whitespace changes"

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suriya-ganesh

59 minutes ago

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ah! sorry. I meant to say, "the interesting part for me was that we removed code to improve performance."

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pointlessone

1 hour ago

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This is extremely sparse on details.

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bitexploder

44 minutes ago

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Rust is a general purpose systems programming language. There are very few situations where you cannot attain C like performance with Rust. Skill issue, most likely.

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koakuma-chan

1 hour ago

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It feels like a rage bait. It's clearly their own fault and has nothing to do with Rust.

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LAC-Tech

1 hour ago

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maybe Rustaceans shouldn't rage so easily?

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kykat

1 hour ago

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algorithm design and managing memory is something you have to think about regardless of what language you use, that should be obvious. Using rust doesn't guarantee correctness or performance, that should also be obvious.

Rust has features that make it easier to make correct and performant software, I think most programmers would agree?

Please stop this rust clickbait nonsense.

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9rx

49 minutes ago

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> Please stop this rust clickbait nonsense.

But then new content on HN would decline to nearly nothing.

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themafia

47 minutes ago

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> Using rust doesn't guarantee correctness or performance, that should also be obvious.

Judging from the most vocal segment of their community it's very much not obvious to them.

> make it easier

Define "easier." It's harder to make mistakes. I'm not sure this equates to developer "ease" in any way. In fact, if it's meant to be effective, it should be quite the opposite.

> rust clickbait nonsense.

It cuts both ways. There is a huge volume of "I switched to Rust and got 1% additional performance over C" posts here.

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LAC-Tech

1 hour ago

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I wonder to what extent the complexity of the rust language hurts performance. We all only have so much mental capacity, if much of it is spent on the various different intersections of rust's features, that reduces how much we can spend on making things fast.

(I like Rust btw)

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nicoburns

21 minutes ago

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The alternatives with the potential to be as fast (C, C++, D, zig) are more complex in this regard because they make memory safety and lifetime tracking something that you have to keep track of in your head. Rust's biggest win is removing that mental overhead while allowing you to achieve the same performance as those other languages.