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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

I found Golang to be a gateway drug to Rust for me.

If you want strong control and very unforgiving type system with even more unforgiving memory lifetime management so you know your program can get even faster than corresponding C/C++ programs, then Rust is a no-brainer.

But I did not pick it for the speed, though that's a very welcome bonus. I picked it for the strong static typing system mostly. And I like having the choice to super-optimize my program in terms of memory and speed when I need to.

Modelling your data transformations with enums (sum types) and Result/Option was eye-opening and improved my programming skills in all other languages I am using.

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    > you know your program can get even faster than corresponding C/C++ programs

I have seen this argument a few times here are HN. To be clear, I interpret your phrase that Rust "will eventually" be faster than C or C++. (If I read wrong, please correct.) However, I have never seen any compelling evidence that demonstrates equivalent Rust code is faster than C or C++ code. Some lightly Googling tells me that their speeds are roughly equivalent (within 1-2%).

As mentioned, I didn't go to Rust for the performance alone so I didn't track the articles that tried to prove the claim. The stated logic was that due to having more info to work with the toolchain could optimize away, quite aggressively so, many things, to the point of the code becoming lighter-weight than C.

Whether that's true or not, I make no claims. Not a compiler developer.

And yeah I'd be quite content with 1-2% margin compared to C as well.

Here is an example of Rust implementation being faster than C.

https://trifectatech.org/blog/zlib-rs-is-faster-than-c/

Discussions on HN of that post at the time more or less debunked the title's claim, from what I recall.

Hat tip! Here is the original HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43381512

Another thing about that library, like so many "Rust wins" that we are seeing: There is loads of unsafe code.

Yeah that was the one. I too left it unconvinced that Rust can get measurably faster than C, for what it's worth. But as said in another comment, even being 1-2% around the same ballpark is a huge win already and it would be enough for me.

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