TIL even Solana is switching from rust to C for performance reasons

whoopsie

Don't know what Solona is but * fap fap fap *. What are they making that the performance difference is enough to go from Rust to C? Their production will go down hardcore probably. Normally not worth the performance difference I guess.

@retoor

Solana is a cryptocurrency.

And while rust has comparable performance to C, no matter how much they like to parrot it, runtime safety guarantees (which are available in most C runtimes too!) *do* have a runtime overhead. If only by virtue of running additional code.

Are they? A few google searches didn't give me any results. And for what it's worth the end product is WASM so the original language doesn't really matter

Even if, I *highly* doubt performance problems would be the reason. General Rust code is about as fast as general C code, and maybe faster once you factor in the defensive programming techniques necessary to not shoot yourself in the foot

Couple that with the fact that Rust also uses llvm as a backend.... Yeah it's pretty much the same

@12bitfloat I was trying to look up on when that firedancer thing comes out

trump with his stupid coins careened the whole ecosystem into dysfunction. we must go faster

@jestdotty Wat lol

@jestdotty Ah I see. Okay but that's just one implementation of solana verifier. Good on them, but I wouldn't say that all of solana is now switching to C

@12bitfloat not faster, for sure. Also, many defensive programming isn't needed. It's done by other functions. Rust will by default have that overhead everytime. The faster thing is total bullshit.

@retoor Not really. Yes, Rust does force you to do it correctly, but you should *also* be doing that in C. Like Mutex, Atomics, etc.

And if you know what you're doing you can easily just use a bit of unsafe and circumvent all that

But for real, answer me this: In a C project with 50k+ LOC would you really write layers of functions returning temporary values which stem from other arguments? Maybe, but that's pretty damn risky, because at some point somebody is gonna screw up

In Rust, you can just do that. For free. References are literally pointers! But the compiler makes sure you can't screw up

@12bitfloat could it be possible to have a language like rust but not weird? I think I'm just aiming at a better version of C++. C++ also kinda feels like typescript on javascript. The C strings are sting a thing. The C++ string object is a hoax.

@retoor hmm, c# actually. But it laks the real performance. But it'll become my goto language. I consider C# development quite fast but what I've written recently in python was impossible to do so quick with C#. I'm comparison to python even C# development is quite slow. For this project development speed is important. I don't want to work in on a chatapp too long because it doesn't contribute much to my knowledge. So build build build finish move on. My next project will be using go. A much needed molodetz change.

@retoor From a syntax perspective? I think that's mostly just familiarity bias. Some people don't like Rust because they can't read Rust. Which makes sense! But it's not a valid reason to hate the language, because once you *can* read it, it's not that hard

But from a semantic perspective? Yeah..... Rust is kinda hard. And I don't think you can make something like Rust without it being hard

E.g. the rule that there can only ever be either ONE mutable reference to a value (even across threads!) OR potentially many shared references (which you can only read from). It's a VERY restrictive rule which makes writing complex apps in Rust very complex

But you can't remove that. Because it's necessary to guarentee the things Rust guarentees

@12bitfloat you know a language is made for humans right? A language being hard to read is by default not a very good language. I often think Rust is like that with no reason. They could've maybe made a language with the same features without the weird stuff. I just don't see any benefit at all for programmer.

@retoor Rust is actually very easy to read if you know it

It's just hard to write ;D

@retoor But that's why I still, after like 6 years, still *adore* rust

It's not hard because of bullshit like Haskell. Haskell is difficult just so you can jerk off. Rust is hard for a real reason that gives you something. Sure, not everybody likes that. But I kinda do

@12bitfloat programming is more fun if you suffer a bit tho. I made my python project more complex than needed to make it fun but it's still quite easy. I'm lately adding Python as plugin system to my C projects. That's fun. Thanks to that I can easily implement advanced AI in C projects. But also, I've implemented OpenAI API in C. Nobody does that - it doesn't make sense. Well, I did!

I'm waiting until @12bitfloat switches to C for performance reasons :D

@retoor Don't worry, I'm quite happy with the performance of my Rust

It's not about the size but how you use it, as they say ;)

@12bitfloat maybe your dad said that to you because he knows :p for now - I replaced my self written https client in my C project with curl lib bevause of sadly still some very unexpected stuff. And now - by just typing this I realize what the issue is. Will fix it actually. Dammit. Protocol issue, it uses often chunked and sometimes normal. The normal one was so rare that I decided to do it later and I forgot about it. Fuck, raped a lot of code. Hmm, everything is in git tho.