this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Rust is not to blame, but that code that has been written in Rust might be to blame.
The algorithms used have more effect than the language used, and Rust might make using certain algorithms more painful and thus steer programmers towards less efficient algorithms. Using
cloneis often an example of this, it's a little easier and gets around some borrow checker difficulties. (This is true in general, but I don't know if this is what has happened with Lemmy.)Look at salvo [diesel] coming it at #200+ on this benchmark1, lots of programming languages have at least one framework that is faster on the microbenchmark. This isn't especially meaningful, but it does show that, let's say, a feature rich framework in Rust might end up being slower than a Python framework that's laser focused on the specific use case.
There’s a catch here, something I read someone mention on Hacker News and I agree. Python is easy when you don’t care about performance; the moment you need to worry about it, all the easiness gets thrown away.
Everything is easy when you don't care about performance.
Have you ever used py-spy? It's an excellent profiler for Python code (written in Rust 😉). It can attach to a running process and tell you what line is taking the most time. Seems pretty easy to me. (Which is not to say Python can achieve optimal C speed.)
I don't think there's such an easy profiling tool for C or Rust? But I'd be happy to be proven wrong here.
Go solve 20 or 30 Project Euler problems. All of them are solvable in less than a second using Python (or any language). Write your solutions in C or Rust and you will soon see that a naive or brute-force solution in Rust will literally never finish (the heat death of the universe will come first), but a clever and efficient solution in Python takes less than a second.
This is why I say algorithms matter more than language. There's like 2 or 3 orders of magnitude to be had by choosing the fastest language (which is to say, Rust might be 1000 times faster than Python in some cases), but there's like 10 or 20 orders of magnitude to be saved using the right algorithms sometimes.
You’re right, and I also think the problem Lemmy needs to solve is more of a “think smarter about how to optimize information being shared among instances” than throwing Rust at the problem 😆