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by Ygg2 2343 days ago
As a maintainer, I treat almost all PR submission with kind words.

What actix developer did was, to pardon my French, inexcusable. Deeming security patch boring? Making your own `Cell`, implementing it badly and misusing it, because it's faster on some stupid benchmark site?

If we designed cars like that, they would have no breaks, no gears and no cabin.

Honestly, I think it's better Rust abandons `actix` asap. Before it gets any real traction.
2 comments
oaiey 2343 days ago
The same "stupid" benchmark site let to dramatical improved .NET Core performance , re-engineered the .NET Server stack and even changed the C# language on the way.

I do not know how the Rust community manages performance comparison, but the .NET bubble was broken by that page and resulted in awesome results for the platform.

PS: just pointing out what the page achieved somewhere else. The discussion about the maintainer and what happened there is a different topic.

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Ygg2 2343 days ago
That might be true for Dotnet.

But from what I heard, to get where it is, actix developer took some really bizzare shortcuts. E.g. hardcoding parts of response. On top of general unsafe usage.

I think the benchmarks are flawed, since they don't account for such "optimizations".

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oaiey 2343 days ago
The benchmark is very smart in that sense. It has multiple stages (e.g. plaintext, db access,...). It proves with each stage deeper into your stack. You can disable there parts of your stack (e.g. middlewares, views, controllers, ...) and just operate on low level http request response pairs. And there you can hardcode on top then (as the application). The stages of the benchmark are optimized for testing individual disciplines like the connection and memory management of the low level http server and parser.

In .NET case they changed the language in response to the needs of the Techempower benchmark (and the Unity3d engine) to allow safe and performing ops. .NET also has the unsafe keyword for low level ops and is surely also used. The advantage of .NET is that it was a team with a central manager who pushed all areas, http framework, base class library and language into the same direction. A community like Rust does not have that privilege.

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Argorak 2343 days ago
The "boring" was in response to the comment above it, which was discussing if the patch is large enough to merit a statement that they are contributing under the projects license.

The patch was "boring", not substantial to claim copyright.

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Ygg2 2343 days ago
It's not. It's boring because people want to fix unsafe. Read

https://gist.github.com/pcr910303/d7722a26499d0e9d2f9034a06f...

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