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Comment by Riverheart | Hacker News Reader

One of Rust's selling points is zero cost abstractions which would normally imply doing more work with less code (as you would expect in a high level language like Python). So it is surprising that it takes that many more lines of code to achieve what C does without those abstractions.

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1300 vs 1000 is not "that many more".

It's close to insignificant to comparing two languages. Especially when they boil down to things like:

  let ptr = unsafe {
        libc::mmap(
            ptr::null_mut(),
            len,
            libc::PROT_READ | libc::PROT_WRITE,
            libc::MAP_SHARED,
            file.as_raw_fd(),
            0,
        ) as *mut u8
    };

vs calling something like this in one line in C, etc.

The C version also crams every line together, the Rust version couples related statements but leave newlines between others (not sure if loc counts those too).

"zero cost abstractions" usually means you don't pay a performance penalty for abstractions you do not use.

Also means that the abstractions themselves don't introduce unnecessary overhead. It's taken from C++.

C++ implementations obey the zero-overhead principle: What you don’t use, you don’t pay for [Stroustrup, 1994]. And further: What you do use, you couldn’t hand code any better. – Stroustrup

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/05/11/traits.html

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