Re:Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks
by greyhair on Monday January 04, 2021 @06:48PM
(#25639922)
It is funny when I think of the hundreds of thousands of lines of code I have shipped in my long career (all embedded) and how little of it ever had to handle a string.
I agree, C is a really poor choice for string or other human readable content handling.
But if you have to read-shift-mask-write bytes to hardware control registers, it is a pretty easy language to use, and faster than assembly language in 90% of the cases, with modern compilers. That last note was less true in the mid 1980s, but by the mid-1990s, compiler optimization had gotten to be quite good.
Cellular modem code that runs on DSPs is written in C. Maybe someday that will be written in Rust. We'll see.
I agree, C is a really poor choice for string or other human readable content handling.
But if you have to read-shift-mask-write bytes to hardware control registers, it is a pretty easy language to use, and faster than assembly language in 90% of the cases, with modern compilers. That last note was less true in the mid 1980s, but by the mid-1990s, compiler optimization had gotten to be quite good.
Cellular modem code that runs on DSPs is written in C. Maybe someday that will be written in Rust. We'll see.