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by moloch-hai 1302 days ago
For real programs, you should demand that the compiler hoist such checks out of the loop, which may then be vectorized the usual way.

If the compiler can't do that by itself, a library should do it.

The real issue is whether the information about the true size of the memory region involved is available at the point where it is needed. This may come down to how good the language is at capturing desired semantics in a library. Rust still has a long way to go to catch up with C++ on this axis, and C++ is not waiting around.

Rust claims responsibility for enforcing safety in the compiler, with libraries using "unsafe" to delegate some of that to themselves. Users then trust the compiler and libraries to get it right. In C++, the compiler provides base semantics while libraries take up the whole responsibility for safety. Users can trust libraries similarly as in Rust, to similar effect.

Modern C++ code typically does no visible operations with pointers at all, and most often does not index directly in arrays, preferring range notation, as in Rust, achieving correctness by construction. A correct program is implicitly a safe program.

3 comments

> This may come down to how good the language is at capturing desired semantics in a library. Rust still has a long way to go to catch up with C++ on this axis, and C++ is not waiting around.

What catch up does Rust need to do?

Rust has slice that know the size of its data built in the language, while C++ doesn't. And Rust has stricter const and mutability rules that facilitates optimizations.

As for the implementation, Rust use LLVM which is also the backend used by one of the popular C++ compiler.

I am talking about language features that library authors can use to capture and express semantics in their libraries... but only if the language implements those features. C++ just has a lot more of them.
Like what, for example? To the contrary, I think that, other than constness, C++ has rather few facilities to communicate semantic invariants to the compiler.
And event const can't in general be used for optimizations (because there can be another reference to the same location, or one can just const_cast)
If the thread you are on doesn't modify the variable (e.g. by const_cast), and that variable isn't atomic or volatile, the compiler should be allowed to treat it as invariant. Whether it does in practice probably depends on a lot of things though.
Yeah, but the compiler need to see through all the functions to find out that there is no const_cast and therefore makes const useless because it could as well see it is not modified. Also it needs to be good at alias analysis.
> For real programs, you should demand that the compiler hoist such checks out of the loop, which may then be vectorized the usual way.

LLVM sometimes does this, but when it doesn't, you may insert asserts to guide the optimizer, as explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33808853

I think this technique works in C and C++ too (if you use clang or gcc)

Sometimes a __builtin_assert(c) may help (which is not the same as the normal assertion, which won't). Other times, you need to make a private copy of a value that the compiler could not otherwise assume will not be clobbered.
Unfortunely I only see Modern C++ on C++ conference talks and on my hobby projects.

Most of the stuff I see at work, is quite far from this ideal reality, starting with Android's codebase, or the various ways C++ gets used in Microsoft frameworks.

There are choices for places to work. Maybe try another one?