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by vlovich123 631 days ago
That’s a choice you get to make and probably depends on your problem domain and other things. For example when I was writing R2 it was all ArrayBuffers up and down the stack. And you could use something like capnproto or flat buffers for managing your object graph within an array buffer. But yeah, being able to transfer custom object graphs would be more powerful.
2 comments
formerly_proven 631 days ago
There is this assumption in these discussions that anything consuming significant CPU must necessarily have a simple interface that’s easy to reduce to a C-level ABI, like calling an ML library on an image, a numpy function on two big matrices or some encryption function. Therefore it is trivial to just move these to native code with an easy, narrow interface.

This assumption is incorrect. There are plenty of problems that consist entirely of business logic manipulating large and complex object graphs. “Just rewrite the hot function in rust, bro” and “just import multiprocessing, bro” are functionally identical to rewriting most of the application for these.

The performance work of the last few years, free threading and JIT are very valuable for these. All the rest is already written in C.

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wruza 631 days ago
It's a good assumption though, because it keeps (in this case kept) closed the door to the absolutely nightmarish landscape of "multithreading to the masses". Those who made it open probably see it better, but, imo and ime, it should remain closed. Maybe they'll manage to handle it this time, but I'm 95% sure it's gonna be yet another round of ass pain for the world of python.
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adgjlsfhk1 630 days ago
otoh, if all of your time is spent in python code and you have performance issues, it's time to rewrite in a different language. Correct multi threaded coffee is take hard and python is inherently really slow. the inherent complexity of multi threaded code is enough that you should just write the single threaded version in a language that's 10x faster (of which there are many)
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pansa2 630 days ago
> “Just rewrite the hot function in rust, bro” and “just import multiprocessing, bro” are functionally identical to rewriting most of the application for these.

Isn't "just use threads, bro" likely to be equally difficult?

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adgjlsfhk1 630 days ago
no. it's much harder
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tombl 631 days ago
Is this some internal cloudflare feature flag or can everybody pass ArrayBuffers zero-copy via service bindings?

(random question, totally understand if you're not the right person to ask)

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dwattttt 630 days ago
It's not a cloudflare thing: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Worker/post...
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