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Comment by m00dy | Hacker News Reader

It is a problem of statistics and depends on internals of underlying operating system. I’m not sure you really need that sort of optimisation

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What does this have to do with the operating system? There are no syscalls in the code measured here.

Because rust is a compiled language and therefore it means you compile your code to a certain architecture. Who told you about syscalls ? There are systems not using syscalls

There are no syscalls or equivalent operating system calls in the code paths measured. The architecture is also independent of the operating system, with exceptions in some languages for the calling convention (not in rust, afaik, or at least rust makes no guarantees there.)

However, in practice Rust's calling convention does actually depend on the operating system. So on Linux Rust will make use of the stack red zone, while on Windows it doesn't. (Also some codegen in LLVM depends on the operating system)

The dependency is on the ABI, which can be OS-dependent. Also, it is a depressingly manual optimization to do: compilers don't know when it is safe to change a reference to a copy (for example) without an analysis of future code that they don't do.

With Rust ownership guarantees, the compiler has the info it needs to perform this kind of optimizations.

C and C++ are also set up such that the compiler can do that optimization, they just don't. I'm pretty sure the Rust compiler is in the same boat - has the information, but doesn't do the optimization.

The "C ABI" is really "the platform ABI", because most OS are interacted with through libc (or equivalent).

Though that should not apply to Rust at all, as it does not pledge to follow the C ABI internally (aka `extern "Rust"`).

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