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by mhh__ 1743 days ago
> Blazing fast

So have you measured it or do you just mean you haven't implemented as many features? -> Usually the latter.

1 comments

Cynicism aside, from what I’ve seen it’s been the former. See regex and rg by burntsushi as an example.
Don't get me wrong there's a lot of room for speed in programs we use regularly, but I make two observations:

    1. Speed is usually found by by people have worked on 
    existing tools in the space, and they don't often make 
    that much of a song and dance about it beyond that 
    theirs is faster.

    2. Speed is found in the minds of people not in their 
    tools. When you get past a certain amount of native- 
    ness, you get optimizations by knowing more or having 
    a brilliant insight into the problem rather than using 
    a new meme-language. It might be necessary for certain 
    types of programming but it's not sufficient.
Basically I don't like weird meme based marketing of tech. I'm a grumpy old man already and I'm the ripe old age of 20
You were the one that cynically asked if the advertised performance improvements were real or imaginary, not me.

To your point, many of the improvements from Rust-based tools appears to come from the ability to express performant semantics safely and elegantly in the language. You could write an equivalent in C, but the Rust one comes naturally, can be expressed at a higher level with better abstractions, and often comes out with top-tier performance before even investing in microoptimizarions (as long as the Big-O performance is in check).