Speed of Rust vs. C

Re:Speed of Rust vs. C by zelphirkalt on Saturday March 13, 2021 @12:13PM (#26447973)

If I understand correctly, the Erlang point was, that you can have a distributed system by using Beam to scale to multiple machines and have them communicate via message passing, which is all possible and encouraged, because of how you structure and write code in Erlang, as actors with mailboxes, isolating actors from each other, except for the messages, that are passed.

You say, that the Erlang concurrency model has higher overhead than Rust. In Rust there are probably multiple projects going on right now (one of them is Bastion, but I guess there are probably others), which try to provide Erlang like concurrency. What do you mean by overhead of a concurrency model (that of Erlang) being higher than the overhead a programming language (Rust)? As far as I know Erlang's lightweight processes are about as lightweight as you can get. Is there a Rust framework for Erlang like concurrency, which reduces the footprint of lightweight processes even more?

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Re:Speed of Rust vs. C by bluejekyll on Saturday March 13, 2021 @12:57PM (#26448397)

That wasn’t meant to be a snide comment about Erlang in any way. All I meant by the comment about higher-overhead was that the language itself generally has more costs to run, i.e. runtime, memory usage, garbage collector, interpreted, etc, than Rust.

The “process” model of Erlang is about as lightweight as you can get, agreed.

In terms of capabilities of beam across systems, point taken. Though we start stretching some of the understanding of where languages end and runtimes begin... Rust and C make those boundaries a little more clear.

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