Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks

Re:Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks by littlestymaar on Sunday January 03, 2021 @06:46PM (#25626421)

> The reason that C programs often don’t perform as well as an equivalent rust program[1] is that it’s so incredibly hard to do anything at all in C (especially something reliable) that one can usually only do the simplest thing possible and this typically means simple data structures, simple algorithms and arrays

Brian Cantrill talks[1] about exactly this: in his C version he was using AVL trees because they are easy to implement, while his Rust version was using B-trees just because he could. And as a result, his naive first attempt in Rust outperformed his long-optimized C code.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgtRAbE1nBM&t=43m15s

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Re:Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks by jstimpfle on Monday January 04, 2021 @08:35PM (#25640933)

So he's comparing the AVL tree he wrote himself to a B-tree optimized to death by someone else?

Out of interest though, does he mention somewhere which actual implementation he used?

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Re:Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks by aldonius on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @02:40AM (#25643154)

Yes, and I suppose that's some of the point: a performant library ecosystem is one hell of a feature.

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Re:Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks by jstimpfle on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @03:45AM (#25643505)

It sure must be a nice feature - for fast results. Counterpoint, though. I barely used Rust, but when I wanted to play with the Xi editor I got to see the bad places that buying into such an ecosystem can get you to - places formerly pioneered by NPM. I had to download 100s of packages, (IIRC?) there were some build problems, all for something where I don't really see the value of noteworthy dependencies.

If you really need a Btree (like, if you want to make a fair benchmark for a presentation) then you'll absolutely find a reasonable implementation in C. After all, why would you need dependency management for something that should have 0 dependencies?

As an example of library data structures implemented in C - if you want, check out my Red-black tree (not a Btree): https://github.com/jstimpfle/rb3ptr/blob/master/rb3ptr.h . It's really easy to integrate into your project. I think the API (found in rb3ptr.h) is totally usable, and it might also be faster than what you can get with safe Rust - unless you can easily use intrinsically linked data structures in safe Rust.

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