Rust Performance Pitfalls

Re:Rust Performance Pitfalls by kibwen on Thursday June 08, 2017 @07:19PM (#14517942)

Even if someone that you trust is telling you to use a specific unsafe API and that "it's no less safe than when we do the same in C/C++", proper responsible usage of that API always requires reading the documentation to determine which invariants must be upheld, if only because you ought to be documenting those exact same invariants (and describing the measures that you take to uphold them) in your own code. Don't trust anyone; Rust caters to the paranoid. :P

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Re:Rust Performance Pitfalls by kbenson on Thursday June 08, 2017 @08:00PM (#14518163)

If someone says "here's a simple mergesort implementation. It requires unsafe in a few sports, for performance"[1] or even "you can implement a fairly normal mergesort, but oyu may want to use unsafe in areas A and B for speed", I view that differently than if someone says "you can access strings without confirming they are UTF-8 encoded with str::from_utf8_unchecked, but it requires unsafe".

One, has, for the most part a self contained implementation and is part of a very well known algorithm. Checking that the implementation doesn't have any obvious flaws may be sufficient.

The other has implications that far outlive the small suggested bit of code. Until you've correctly made sure that anything resulting from this call has been confirmed to conform to UTF-8, there is a risk in it's use in any number of string processing routines.

The article, to it's credit, does mention that problem with UTF-8 when working with it unchecked, albeit vaguely. What I don't think would have been sufficient for an article that aims to help people would be to say "it required unsafe" and leave it at that. That would be suggesting a routine for performance reasons without sufficiently addressing the real downsides.

Thus, my assertion, that simply noting that something requires unsafe is sufficient to denote in all cases the consequences of the suggestion, as I interpreted rabidferret comment to imply.

Another way of stating my argument is "when suggesting unsafe as a possible solution, it behooves you to mention any non-obvious consequences this specific suggestion might entail." That's a fairly uncontroversial view, in my eyes, so I'm not sure exactly why I've had to explain it four separate times now.

1: Like in the rust standard sort algorithm.

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Re:Rust Performance Pitfalls by blaenk on Friday June 09, 2017 @05:28PM (#14524727)

For what it's worth, I've used Rust for years and understand what you're saying and completely agree.

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