logoalt Hacker News

josephg • today at 4:50 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Honestly I'm not quite sure what point you're making.

> If he needed his app to be 30% faster he would have made it so

Would he have? Improving performance by 30% usually isn't so easy. Especially not in a codebase which (according to Cantrill) was pretty well optimized already.

The performance boost came to him as a surprise. As I remember the story, he had already made the C code pretty fast and didn't realise his C hash table implementation could be improved that much. The fact rust gave him a better map implementation out of the box is great, because it means he didn't need to be clever enough to figure those optimizations out himself.

Its not an apples-to-apples comparison. But I don't think comparing the world's fastest C code to the world's fastest rust code is a good comparison either, since most programmers don't write code like that. Its usually incidental, low effort performance differences that make a programming language "fast" in the real world. Like a good btree implementation just shipping with the language.

Replies

mandw • today at 6:30 AM

I did feel my post was a bit unneeded when I added my edit :)

   My point about the  30% was that you mentioned that he got in rust and attributed it to essentially, better algorithms in the rust lib he used.  Once he knew that then its hard to say that rust is 'faster' but the point is valid and I accept that he gained performance by using the rust library.

   My other point was that the speed of his code probably didn't matter at the time. If it was a problem in the past he probably would have taken the time to profile and gain some more speed.  Sure you cant gain speed that can't be had but as you pointed out, it wasn't a language issue, it was an implementation of the library issue.

   He could have arbitrarily used a different program that used a good library and the results reversed.

   I also agree that most devs are not working down at that level of optimisation so the default libraries can help but at the same time it mostly doesnt matter if something takes 30% longer if that overall time is not a problem.   If you are working on something where the speed really matters and you are trying to shave off milliseconds then you have to be that developer that can work C or Rust at that level.
mjevans • today at 6:20 AM

What I think it illustrates more is how much classic languages could gain by having a serious overhaul of their standard library and maybe even a rebrand if that's the expected baseline of a conformant implementation.