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Comment by sylvestre | Hacker News Reader

Good question!

Probably not. In general, functionalities are enabling or disabling a behavior when doing an operation. In the code, it translates most of the time by a simple if else. For example, adding new options usually looks like this PR: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/2880/files

The performance wins are usually produced by using some fancy Rust features.

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That’s only correct if you focus exclusively on optional features enabled by feature flags or environmental variables. Some features might be around support for things like Unicode where a tool could work 90% of the time but that extra 10% of support requires implementing a lot of additional logic that slows the routine down for the other 90% of use cases too.

Also ‘if’ causes branching which costs a small amount of CPU overhead. So it’s not a free operation and can quickly add up if you needed inside a hot path.

For new flags, this is easily solved by generating and compiling (via generic monomorphization, macros or build-time code generation) two versions of all the relevant code (including of course any loops calling the relevant code) and switching the one that is executed depending on the value of the flag.

This is true, but also results in larger binaries. Elsewhere in this thread, it was noted that the coreutils compiled from the Rust code are already quite a bit bigger than the GNU counterparts. On many systems this might not matter much (and I guess it's fine if a software suite explicitly makes binary size a non-goal), but on some systems it does.

> Some features might be around support for things like Unicode where a tool could work 90% of the time but that extra 10% of support requires implementing a lot of additional logic that slows the routine down for the other 90% of use cases too.

This kind of thing is where Rust really shines. The ecosystem was built post-unicode, so things tend to support it by default. Ripgrep for example has been unicode aware from the beginning, and you have to opt-out if you don't want that.

I’m aware of Rusts support for Unicode, I was only using that as an example because it’s easy to visualise since most people who’ve written any kind of text parsing will understand the additional computational overhead correctly supporting Unicode costs. But while the example doesn’t directly apply to Rust, I guarantee you that there will be other edge cases in a similar vein that might cause issues.

Well, they could be doing some simplifications and assumptions that can improve performance.

Also performance is not always the only factor to consider: you can optimize a program for speed, but also for RAM usage, or the size of the binary itself.

In program like Coreutils to me is more important that the programs are small than the rest. Typically you use a lot of commands in a script, to do some trivial operations (the input of the program is usually small), thus simpler programs (that have less startup time) are usually better.

>Coreutils to me is more important that the programs are small than the rest

Then use BusyBox/Matchbox....because..well that's the whole point of those projects.

https://busybox.net/about.html

After the first time the binary is executed, it should be comfortably in the memory disk cache. And frankly, on a modern SSD, the sector size is large enough that the only difference is reading 3 instead of 1 sectors to call "ls". Barely matters if it gets batched.

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