In the branchy function, id is only compared if distance is equal, and since distance is a random float, this almost never happens and the corresponding branch is nearly perfectly predicted. The branchless function always compares both id and distance, effectively doing twice the work. It's only part of the reason why there's a 2x performance difference, but I thought it was interesting.
I really don't know how LLVM picks between branches or conditional moves, but my guess is that it doesn't assume that float equality is any less likely than other conditions, and some optimization pass in O3 turns unpredictable branches into conditional moves. I base this on the fact that adding std::hint::unlikely to the "equal" branch produces the same assembly for the function in both modes.
Whether it's safe to assume in general that float equality is unlikely for the purpose of program optimization, I'll leave to the compiler engineers. If you know the data your program will be handling, adding hints will avoid these surprises.
What secret setting is that? Whether taking a branch or a conditional move is faster or not depends a lot on the code and the data it's being run on so it's not easy to say up front which one is always faster.
While working on my game, I tried implementing a custom priority queue.
It ended up being > 2x faster in debug build, but 2x-5x slower in the release build (??!!?) [1]. I haven't learned much about compilers/"lower level" C++, so I moved on at that point.
How it worked:
1.) The P.Q. created a vector and resized it to known bounds.
2.) The P.Q. kept tract of and updated the "active sorting range" each time an element was inserted or popped.
2B.) So each time an element is added, it uses the closest unused vector element and updates the ".end" range to sort
2C.) Each time an element was removed, it updated the ".start" range
3.) In theory this should have saved reallocation overhead.
[1] I believe Visual Studio uses -O0 for debug, and -O2 for release.
These kinds of things are really interesting, and a good example of the importance of performance testing in optimized builds. I encountered something similar and realized the issue was different sizes of structures in debug vs release which ended up causing the CPU cache lines to overlap and invalidate. Though that sounds unlikely here.
I'm curious what you did with the "active sorting range" after a push/pop event. Since it's a vector underneath, I don't see any option other than to sort the entire range after each event, O(N). This would surely destroy performance, right?
The second one is your problem. Haswell is 15 years old now. Almost nobody owns a CPU that old. -O3 makes a lot of architecture-dependent decisions, and tying yourself to an antique architecture gives you very bad results.
"Haswell or newer" is a bit misleading here, because there were low-end Celerons and Pentiums shipped for years after the release of Haswell that lacked AVX2 and wouldn't be able to run software compiled for -march=haswell.
Oh, yeah. Looking at the code the comparison function is bad in a way that will hit issues with cmovs. The "else if" there is a nearly 100% predictable branch which follows a branch that's probably completely unpredictable. One optimization you get with -O3 is that branches not marked likely or unlikely can be turned into dataflow. The proper ordering for that code is to pull the equality check forward into an if statement and mark with "unlikely" if you're using -O3, and then return the ordering of the floating point comparison.
Since we're using Rust there's some decent syntactic sugar for this function you can use instead:
Because number bigger doesn’t translate to higher perceived performance…
The only compelling reason that I want to upgrade my Sandy Lake chip is AVX2.
So it is instruction set not perf, sure there will be improved performance but most of the things that are actually performance issues is already handed off to the GPU.
On that note probably rebar and PCIe4 but those aren’t dramatic differences, if CPU is really a problem (renders/compilation) then it gets offloaded to different hardware.
> Because number bigger doesn’t translate to higher perceived performance…
When the numbers are that far apart, there is definitely room to perceive a performance improvement.
2011 era hardware is dramatically slower than what’s available in 2025. I go back and use a machine that is less than 10 years old occasionally and it’s surprising how much less responsive it feels, even with a modern high speed SSD drive installed.
Some people just aren’t sensitive to slow systems. Honestly a great place to be because it’s much cheaper that way. However, there is definitely a speed difference between a 2011 system and a 2025 system.
Choice of things like desktop environments matters a lot. I’m using xfce or lxde or something (I can’t tell without checking top), and responsiveness for most stuff is identical between 2010 intel and a ryzen 9.
The big exceptions are things like “apt get upgrade”, but both boxes bottleneck on starlink for that. Modern games and compilation are the other obvious things.
> Modern games and compilation are the other obvious things.
I mean if we exempt all of the CPU intensive things then speed of your CPU doesn’t matter
I don’t have a fast CPU for the low overhead things, though. I buy one because that speed up when I run commands or compile my code adds up when I’m doing 100 or 1000 little CPU intensive tasks during the day. A few seconds or minutes saved here and there adds up multiplied by 100 or 1000 times per day. Multiply that by 200 working days per year and the value of upgrading a CPU (after over a decade) is very high on the list of ways you can buy more time. I don’t care so much about something rendering in 1 frame instead of 2 frames, but when I type a command and have to wait idly for it to complete, that’s just lost time.
Especially on single core, everything is painfully slow. Tried to install linux on a ppc imac G5 five years ago and I had to admit that it was never going to be a good experience, even for basic usage
I went from a Sandy Bridge (i5 2500k) to a Ryzen 9 3950x, and the perceived performance improvement was insane. You also have to take into account RAM and PCIe generation bumps, NVMe, etc.
For what it's worth, you may be pleasantly surprised by the performance if you upgrade. I went from an Ivy Bridge processor to a Zen 3 processor, and I found that there were a lot of real world scenarios which got noticably faster. For example, AI turns in a late game Civ 6 map went from 30s to 15s. I can't promise you'll see good results, but it's worth considering.
Not as old but I am still typing this on a MacBook Pro Early 2015 with a Broadwell CPU. It is doing pretty well with Chrome and Firefox, not so much with Safari.
I do. Had to replace the plastics of the laptop and the screen's definition is unacceptable but with Linux and a SSD it's still fine for basic computer usage.
Not my daily driver but kept it as a daily drivers for 10 years.
This era of CPUs has held up surprisingly well. I built an Ivy Bridge desktop in 2012 that still sees daily productivity use (albeit with an NVMe and RAM upgrade).
Almost everything that people think is ugly about Rust's syntax exists for very specific reasons. Most of the time, imo Rust made a good decision, and is just making something explicit.
Some things take time to get used to (e.g. if let), but for most people that's less an issue of syntax, and more an issue of not understanding a powerful feature (e.g. pattern matching deconstructions).
The reasons do not matter here. It is still ugly / noisy / overly-complicated and probably could have been done better.
I understand pattern matching deconstructions, I have seen it in other languages. Funnily enough they were nowhere as ugly / noisy / complicated as Rust's is. Rust seems to have bolted on a lot of fancy shit that may be appealing to a lot of people and that is it.
In your link, the first one is fugly, the last one is fine. Maybe Rust just encourages ugly (i.e. complicated) code a bit too much.
As someone who mostly writes Clojure code professionally during the day, I agree, Rust's syntax is complicated for no good reason, ugly and overly-verbose. But then I think that about most Algol-like language too, not just Rust.
And despite that I do use Rust when I want something simple to deploy/deliver, as handing over a binary that just runs is such a nice experience, and it's real easy to make fast. As long as I don't have to maintain in long-term, Rust is fine for what it is.
> It is still ugly / noisy / overly-complicated and probably could have been done better.
I don't know, it feels like you're just saying that you don't like it, missed the point of the post, and are not giving us anything concrete. Can you list a very clear example of how you'd improve the syntax?
Again, see the post: You can remove things, but you're losing explicitness or other things. If you want a language that's more implicit, this is fine. I don't.
> Can you list a very clear example of how you'd improve the syntax?
The demand that I must design a better language to have valid criticism is absurd - I don't need to be a chef to know food tastes bad, do I? I'm a user of languages, not a language designer. My job is to evaluate whether Rust's syntax serves my needs, not to solve the PL design problems that led to it.
The syntax is noisy. That's not "missing the point" - that's the direct consequence of the design choices you're defending. If your argument is "the complexity is necessary for memory safety" fine, but don't pretend the cost doesn't exist or that pointing it out is invalid.
You're conflating "can identify a problem" with "must solve the problem". Those are different skills. I'm evaluating Rust as a user, not auditioning as a language designer.
No, I just don't think you have identified a problem in the first place. You've complained a lot, but you've not even been specific enough to point at a single concrete thing! You've been so lacking in specifics I don't even know if you'd prefer Ocaml, Go, or Python-style syntax over Rust! Like, I can't tell since all you've said is that you don't like it, without even telling me how you don't like it or what you prefer!
You say "over-complicated". I disagree, my impression is that is mostly about as complicated as it needs to be to solve the problems it is trying to solve.
I'm actually fine with almost all the decisions that Rust made in terms of logic and concepts, but specifically don't like the synthax itself: the symbols, keywords like the consonant-only "fn" instead of "func" for instance, the fact that || {} starts a lambda instead of || -> void {}, the fact that you can return things by simply having them in an if branch. It's the main reason I don't use the language.
Most of those are a matter of preference, implicit return is just plain better, and it would be absolutely insane if closures required the return type to be specified. I do agree that the toilet bowl `|_|()` syntax is ugly, though.
Again, I think JS/Typescript has a better syntax, since the implicit syntax is better when unbranched, like x => expression, but it's harder to read the more branches there are, since it's hard to visually scan where results can be located.
I really dislike them. Makes me wonder if you just got distracted and forgot to finish the function. Be explicit, don't make me have to spend time figuring it out.
Meh, if these are the main reasons you don't use the language, I don't know what to tell you. I get having preferences, but whether the keyword is `fn` or `func` is such a banal, trivial thing that doesn't matter at all.
They could have at least put the types on the left. Types on the right are a good fit for mathematics, where everything is single-letter symbols, so your eyes do not have to go across the line to see the entire definition, but in programming function definitions often span an entire line on screen, so the most important information should be the first thing shown! Also most programmers do not have formal education in mathematics, so the whole "function : domain -> image" syntax is foreign to them. We really should strive to democratise programming for everyone, rather than make it isolated to a small clique of "properly" educated white men who all went to the same university.
The type of a variable and the return type of a function are the most important pieces of information regarding those, so they ought to be on the left. It also fits the data flow going right to left (i.e. how the '=' operator works). C's type declarations can get pretty gnarly, so there is definitely room for improvement there. I would say Java (and C#) got it as close to perfect as possible.
If you want to replace C/C++ you should make your language look as inviting as possible to users of the old one. I truly think this strange fetish for putting types on the right is what gives C programmers the ick when they see Rust for the first time and is hampering its adoption.
After using C and Java for years and years I absolutely loved types on the right when I started using Scala. On the right just makes so much more sense to me, and I'm not a math guy.
"if let" just breaks my brain, it feels backwards to me and takes me a minute each time to work out what's going on. In 40 years of programming I've never seen a syntactic construct that I found less intuitive. And it would probably be easily fixable, if it was more along the lines of "if x matches Some(let z)".
as a beginner rust programmer, I agree. it takes me way longer to parse someone else's rust code than it does for me to read C or C++, even though I have about the same amount of experience with them.
in that example, I had to look up what "if let Err() =" does, because it's not intuitive to me. it seems like every time I read rust code, I have to learn about some strange feature that's probably convenient when you know it, but there's a billion of them and they add up to hard to read code until you've spent tons and tons of time with rust. it's just so much to memorize compared to other languages.
I have the opposite experience: C++ is what I have the most experience with by a very wide margin, but I find reading other people's rust code way easier than other people's C++ code. There's way more weird features, language extensions and other crazy stuff in C++ land.
I believe you, I haven't contributed a lot of C++ code and it's quite possible the projects I have contributed to (e.g. godot engine) just happen to be written very legibly.
It reminds me the experience I had when working with Scala, I really tried to like it but the mind-boggling amount of features created similar issues.
It took me about 2 years to feel somewhat comfortable but I'd still run into code where someone decided to use their own set of unconventional favourite features, requiring me to learn yet-another-way to do the same thing I had seen done in other ways.
I just got tired of it, didn't feel more productive nor enlightened...
Don't understand this complaint about Rust, but I'll give you Scala. Never seen a language so finely tuned to empower architecture astronauts to make terrible decisions. And boy do they make terrible decisions.
It takes at most a week to get used to just about any syntax. It should absolutely never be a reason not to try a new language. That said, it would be lovely if Rust had a more ML-like, rather than C-like, syntax (being originally inspired by O’Caml), but that would likely not help attract devs in the intended target audience!
The insert function, for what it’s worth, has nonstandard formatting; the de facto standard rustfmt tool would use more newlines, making it clearer and less dense. The function also uses a couple of syntactic features like `if let`, which may seem unfamiliar at first but become second nature in a few days at most.
It probably takes a week to get used to ugly pants too. OP's point is a matter of aesthetic judgement. I don't mind it either, but = |&I: can| -> Agree { Rust::Syntax }; is.a(Bit(&mut chaotic);
I should probably have used something less ambivalent than "getting used to". There's certainly more elegance in Rust's semantics than syntax, but the latter doesn't really differ much from C, except for much better for loops, a sane declaration syntax (this is a BIG deal), and of course all the features that C just doesn't have, like closures^* Some of the syntax noise just has to be there in some way, to support the real deal which is the semantics.
^* I don't particularly enjoy the Ruby-borrowed || either, particularly because Alt-7 is a terrible key combination to type, but oh well.
Every time a language developer chooses to give their new language a novel, let alone chaotic, syntax, they sin against the very premise of software development being an engineering profession. Can you imagine the madness if mechanical engineers had the same laissez-faire mentality towards the conventions and learned best practices of their field? Randomly chosen bolts to use left hand threads just because it suits their arbitrary whim, every thread has a unique pitch never seen before just to make the machine stand out from the crowd. Parts of the machine use hot rivets, not because the design demands it but because it scratches a retro aesthetic itch the designer had that day. Every time a new machine is designed it has a whole class of new never before seen quirky ways of being put together and any mechanic who pleads for standardization on common sense ways of putting a thing together are just told to git gud because the creative expression of the 'engineers' is paramount.
(This is how we end up with German cars, isn't it?)
It's of course a matter of perspective, goals, and assumed knowledge. Is it choosing to not follow best practices, or leaving outdated practices with unfixable downsides behind? Is it inventing new things or instead actually just taking already-existing things that you just happened to not know about? Is it making arbitrary changes, or necessary ones for a useful goal? Is an extra bit of temporary pain for existing engineers worth making things better for all future engineers? (not to say that Rust has necessarily made all the right decisions; but alas basically nothing is perfect, and things certainly won't get better if noone tries)
> Every time a language developer chooses to give their new language a novel, let alone chaotic, syntax, they sin against the very premise of software development being an engineering profession.
Exactly which syntax should every language be using then? Everyone will give you a different answer.
> Randomly chosen bolts to use left hand threads just because it suits their arbitrary whim
And there are times when it does make sense to use left-hand threads.
Just because someone looks at new syntax and doesn't immediately understand it doesn't mean that syntax doesn't exist for good reason.
Also, if your language's constructs and semantics don't exactly match those in other languages, then giving them the same syntax would be actively misleading, and therefore a design flaw.
Syntax is also only an issue for people who haven't taken the time to learn the language. If you haven't learned the language, then familiar syntax isn't going to help you anyway. You'll just think you understand something you don't.
It's like asking if the world should standardize on left handed or right handed screws as a default. There comes a point where the choice matters less than picking one at all.
Screw handedness is something that's basically always fine either way if planned for, and with largely no benefit for either option, so standardizing that is easy enough.
But, like, even then, there's screw drive (JIS vs phillips vs pozidriv vs a ton more) to worry about with screws. (never mind the obvious aspects of diameter & length; and whatnot else I happen to not know about)
The significant thing I think is that such trivial impactless questions just do not exist for programming languages. Even like comment starting characters is a messy question - "//" nicely aligns with "/* */" using the slash char, but "#" is a char shorter and interpreted languages need to handle "#!" as a comment for shebangs anyways. And things only get more complicated from there.
And, unlike with physical things, it's trivial to work with non-standardized things in software. Not like you're gonna copy-paste arbitrary code from one language into another and just expect it's gonna work anyway (else we wouldn't have more than one language).
Bit that is more like standardizing on a language, not a syntax across languages.
I also don't think syntax is even a problem worth worrying about. It takes very little time to become accustomed to a new syntax. It's the semantics that are hard to learn. Difficulty syntax can often be helpful when learning a new language, as it serves as a reminder that the semantics are different.
I've written Clojure professionally. It's exactly the language I had in mind when I said that it takes a week to get accustomed to. I find it a very clean and elegant language. Shame that it's dynamically typed.
It’s promises make me interested, but the syntax is my main turnoff. I am a Go person, and I think what brings people to go is the opposite of what brings people to Rust. I am willing to sacrifice some memory safety (because I maybe naively think I can manage to write software without many memory bugs) for the simplicity and dev experience that Go offers.
tbh it's bit boring to get stuck on aesthetic of writing up something. It's a bit nauseous to see how this place is hostile to rust for no reason other than "it's not pretty". It's a joke at this point we could make caricature of HN viewpoint on rust. We get it, you don't like it.
HN is not some monolithic single perspective. There are plenty of Rust fans here, and they show up just as frequently as the complainers. In fact, there is overlap between the two groups. You can be a fan of a tech and still complain about its warts.
Oh come on, how many times have we seen "blazingly fast in Rust", "rewritten in Rust" etc.? Many times. We get it. You like Rust. This "rewrite in Rust" bullshit is just as nauseous and I am sick of seeing it, too. So what? In fact, it is quite a meme now.
Please, every time you see someone praise Rust (every other day), tell them the same as you have told me, just the opposite way around.
It really reads quite simply once you're familiar with the language. You only see chaos because there are none of the semantic hooks you'd get from experience
Forth and Common Lisp are demanding, but they demand different things of the novice programmer than Rust.
The latter's baroque syntax is not provably good or necessary, but I'd call it the other end of a compromise for safety and expressiveness. And once you learn it, you've learned much of the language by default.
Not so with with the first two! The mental models involved in reasoning about a piece of code require much more cognition on the part of the programmer.
Sounds like you are heavily biased in favor of Rust. What you said about Forth and Common Lisp applies to Rust, too, no matter how much you are trying to deny the reality of it. Just admit that you love Rust, and quite biased in favor of it.
I do like Rust quite a bit. I don't know Forth or Common Lisp as well, but I don't dislike them. I admit, I have learned very little about them from you so far.
You strike me as someone who isn't really prepared to have an actual debate on technical matters, because all you have done is:
- manufacture some fictional strawman who is complaining about languages you like
- tell me I'm wrong without even bothering to get into why
- claim that I'm biased, when all I've done is explain my opinion that all three languages are challenging in different ways
See your statement: "Not so with with the first two! The mental models involved in reasoning about a piece of code require much more cognition on the part of the programmer.".
Your whole comment is about favoring Rust over those two because Rust is your beloved language.
Additionally, it is not up to me to teach you Forth nor Common Lisp.
Finally, you should read your own comment where you replace Rust with Common Lisp, for example, and Forth and Common Lisp with Rust. You may see what I was referring to.
In fact, let me do it for you:
> Rust is demanding, but they demand different things of the novice programmer than Common Lisp.
The latter's baroque syntax is not provably good or necessary, but I'd call it the other end of a compromise for safety and expressiveness. And once you learn it, you've learned much of the language by default.
> Not so much with Rust! The mental models involved in reasoning about a piece of code require much more cognition on the part of the programmer.
I find the short type names for integers and float hard to read. Somehow the size of the type is more important than if it is a signed integer, unsigned integer or a floating point number.
Using Vec for arrays is also annoying, repeating the mistake from C++.
> Using Vec for arrays is also annoying, repeating the mistake from C++.
Neither Rust nor C++ uses vectors as array, they're distinct things.
An array is a fixed-size object, which never allocates and its elements thus always retain their memory address. In Rust they're `[T; N]`, in C++ `T[N]` or more recently `std::array<T, N>`.
A vector on the other hand is dynamically sized object, that may (re)allocate to accomodate new elements, and the address of their elements can change. In Rust they're `Vec<T>`; in C++ `std::vector<T>`.
I'm aware of how they are used, but fundamentally there is nothing with the words "array" and "vector" that says that one has a fixed size and the other has a dynamic size. If anything, it should be the other way around. Using the name vector for dynamic arrays is annoying when doing any kind of math coding. Even the designer of STL says the name was a mistake.
I genuinely don't understand how you can find the type names for numbers hard to read, nor how you can say the size is treated as more important. The first thing in the type is what kind of number it is!
For me it is the usage of macros and traits everywhere.
Good luck if you want to get into the code of a library to understand what a function does. You have to go through 3 macros and 5 traits across 5 files. When it could have been just a couple function calls.
People don’t stop and think if they really need that trait or macro for five seconds, they just have to use it every time
That is poor practice IMO. The simple reality of the world is that not everyone uses such tools. Designing a language with the expectation they will is deliberately ignoring the needs of some users.
IDEs were invented by a mix of XEROX PARC, Symbolics, TI efforts into graphical workstations development, we have moved beyond the point of refusal to adopt modern tooling.
In the branchy function, id is only compared if distance is equal, and since distance is a random float, this almost never happens and the corresponding branch is nearly perfectly predicted. The branchless function always compares both id and distance, effectively doing twice the work. It's only part of the reason why there's a 2x performance difference, but I thought it was interesting.
I really don't know how LLVM picks between branches or conditional moves, but my guess is that it doesn't assume that float equality is any less likely than other conditions, and some optimization pass in O3 turns unpredictable branches into conditional moves. I base this on the fact that adding std::hint::unlikely to the "equal" branch produces the same assembly for the function in both modes.
https://godbolt.org/z/erGPKaPcx
Whether it's safe to assume in general that float equality is unlikely for the purpose of program optimization, I'll leave to the compiler engineers. If you know the data your program will be handling, adding hints will avoid these surprises.
You can influence the choice of conditional moves (usually inserting them) with
__builtin_expect_with_probability(..., 0.5)
https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/commit/9f29f02a3...
Nice read. Last week I wrote a blog post about two noteworthy cases of O3 being slower than O2 in C++: https://barish.me/blog/cpp-o3-slower/
As a denser gas, Ozone would have greater friction getting through small pores, so that would be one example?
Hey! I actually appreciate this kind of HN humor. As in, when you pretend to read the title badly.
I thought this would be an article about how ozone is heavier than oxygen and the molecules move slower or something.
I found that surprising, but not as surprising as suddenly reading about Rust!
I love these type of comments! Thank you.
It seems to me that if there is one way that is always faster it would hardly deserve a secret setting, it should be the default?
What secret setting is that? Whether taking a branch or a conditional move is faster or not depends a lot on the code and the data it's being run on so it's not easy to say up front which one is always faster.
While working on my game, I tried implementing a custom priority queue.
It ended up being > 2x faster in debug build, but 2x-5x slower in the release build (??!!?) [1]. I haven't learned much about compilers/"lower level" C++, so I moved on at that point.
How it worked:
1.) The P.Q. created a vector and resized it to known bounds.
2.) The P.Q. kept tract of and updated the "active sorting range" each time an element was inserted or popped.
2B.) So each time an element is added, it uses the closest unused vector element and updates the ".end" range to sort
2C.) Each time an element was removed, it updated the ".start" range
3.) In theory this should have saved reallocation overhead.
[1] I believe Visual Studio uses -O0 for debug, and -O2 for release.
These kinds of things are really interesting, and a good example of the importance of performance testing in optimized builds. I encountered something similar and realized the issue was different sizes of structures in debug vs release which ended up causing the CPU cache lines to overlap and invalidate. Though that sounds unlikely here.
I'm curious what you did with the "active sorting range" after a push/pop event. Since it's a vector underneath, I don't see any option other than to sort the entire range after each event, O(N). This would surely destroy performance, right?
There's no need to resort when popping an item.
When adding an item, it gets added to the next unused vector element. The sorting range end offset gets updated.
Then it sorts (note you would actually need a custom sort since a PriorityQueue is a pair)
Adding an item would be something like: Or maybe I just used Popping an item: [1] Im writing this from memory from my attempt many months ago. May have mistakes.. but should communicate the jistAnd this is why you go and look at the assembly in godbolt to see wtf is going on.
Great post.
I wonder whether profile-guided optimization would have led LLVM to select a better (or worse) decision.
-O3 -march=haswell
The second one is your problem. Haswell is 15 years old now. Almost nobody owns a CPU that old. -O3 makes a lot of architecture-dependent decisions, and tying yourself to an antique architecture gives you very bad results.
The author gives a godbolt link. It takes 5 minutes to add two compilers on raptorlake and see that it gives the same result.
https://godbolt.org/z/oof145zjb
So no, Haswell is not the problem. LLVM just doesn't know about the dependency thing.
Also, if you’re building binaries for redistribution, requiring Haswell or newer is kind of an aggressive choice.
I have a box that old that can run image diffusion models (I upgraded the GPU during covid.)
My point being that compiler authors do worry about “obsolete” targets because they’re widely used for compatibility reasons.
"Haswell or newer" is a bit misleading here, because there were low-end Celerons and Pentiums shipped for years after the release of Haswell that lacked AVX2 and wouldn't be able to run software compiled for -march=haswell.
Oh, yeah. Looking at the code the comparison function is bad in a way that will hit issues with cmovs. The "else if" there is a nearly 100% predictable branch which follows a branch that's probably completely unpredictable. One optimization you get with -O3 is that branches not marked likely or unlikely can be turned into dataflow. The proper ordering for that code is to pull the equality check forward into an if statement and mark with "unlikely" if you're using -O3, and then return the ordering of the floating point comparison.
Since we're using Rust there's some decent syntactic sugar for this function you can use instead:
You probably won't get any CMOVs in -O3 with this function because there are NaN issues with the original code.My desktop computer is a Sandy Bridge from 2011. I still haven't seen any compelling reason to upgrade.
What factors would be compelling to upgrade for?
Just curious, since perf alone doesn’t seem to be the factor.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-2600k
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-14900...
Because number bigger doesn’t translate to higher perceived performance…
The only compelling reason that I want to upgrade my Sandy Lake chip is AVX2.
So it is instruction set not perf, sure there will be improved performance but most of the things that are actually performance issues is already handed off to the GPU.
On that note probably rebar and PCIe4 but those aren’t dramatic differences, if CPU is really a problem (renders/compilation) then it gets offloaded to different hardware.
> Because number bigger doesn’t translate to higher perceived performance…
When the numbers are that far apart, there is definitely room to perceive a performance improvement.
2011 era hardware is dramatically slower than what’s available in 2025. I go back and use a machine that is less than 10 years old occasionally and it’s surprising how much less responsive it feels, even with a modern high speed SSD drive installed.
Some people just aren’t sensitive to slow systems. Honestly a great place to be because it’s much cheaper that way. However, there is definitely a speed difference between a 2011 system and a 2025 system.
Choice of things like desktop environments matters a lot. I’m using xfce or lxde or something (I can’t tell without checking top), and responsiveness for most stuff is identical between 2010 intel and a ryzen 9.
The big exceptions are things like “apt get upgrade”, but both boxes bottleneck on starlink for that. Modern games and compilation are the other obvious things.
> The big exceptions are things like…
> Modern games and compilation are the other obvious things.
I mean if we exempt all of the CPU intensive things then speed of your CPU doesn’t matter
I don’t have a fast CPU for the low overhead things, though. I buy one because that speed up when I run commands or compile my code adds up when I’m doing 100 or 1000 little CPU intensive tasks during the day. A few seconds or minutes saved here and there adds up multiplied by 100 or 1000 times per day. Multiply that by 200 working days per year and the value of upgrading a CPU (after over a decade) is very high on the list of ways you can buy more time. I don’t care so much about something rendering in 1 frame instead of 2 frames, but when I type a command and have to wait idly for it to complete, that’s just lost time.
Believe it or not, "good enough" often is good enough. Regardless of how big the numbers are.
The comment claimed there wasn’t a perceivable difference
That’s different than acknowledging that newer hardware is faster but deciding current hardware is fast enough
Especially on single core, everything is painfully slow. Tried to install linux on a ppc imac G5 five years ago and I had to admit that it was never going to be a good experience, even for basic usage
Agreed that if you’re not using NVMe (as example), that non-CPU upgrade will translate into the biggest perceived benefit.
Then again, not many Sandy Bridge mobo supported NVMe.
I did get a PCI-Express to M2 adapter and installed an NVMe drive.
That was indeed the biggest upgrade ever.
I went from a Sandy Bridge (i5 2500k) to a Ryzen 9 3950x, and the perceived performance improvement was insane. You also have to take into account RAM and PCIe generation bumps, NVMe, etc.
Not OP, but I'm on a 10 year old laptop.
Only thing I'd want is a higher resolution display that's usable in daylight, and longer battery life.
For what it's worth, you may be pleasantly surprised by the performance if you upgrade. I went from an Ivy Bridge processor to a Zen 3 processor, and I found that there were a lot of real world scenarios which got noticably faster. For example, AI turns in a late game Civ 6 map went from 30s to 15s. I can't promise you'll see good results, but it's worth considering.
Not as old but I am still typing this on a MacBook Pro Early 2015 with a Broadwell CPU. It is doing pretty well with Chrome and Firefox, not so much with Safari.
I do. Had to replace the plastics of the laptop and the screen's definition is unacceptable but with Linux and a SSD it's still fine for basic computer usage. Not my daily driver but kept it as a daily drivers for 10 years.
The default is an even older instruction set. Maybe you meant to suggest -march native ?
This era of CPUs has held up surprisingly well. I built an Ivy Bridge desktop in 2012 that still sees daily productivity use (albeit with an NVMe and RAM upgrade).
Off-topic, but I seriously dislike the syntax of Rust. It is chaotic and mind-boggling to me. See the "insert" function.
Good post though.
This point has been litigated to death. Read this here: https://matklad.github.io/2023/01/26/rusts-ugly-syntax.html
Almost everything that people think is ugly about Rust's syntax exists for very specific reasons. Most of the time, imo Rust made a good decision, and is just making something explicit.
Some things take time to get used to (e.g. if let), but for most people that's less an issue of syntax, and more an issue of not understanding a powerful feature (e.g. pattern matching deconstructions).
The reasons do not matter here. It is still ugly / noisy / overly-complicated and probably could have been done better.
I understand pattern matching deconstructions, I have seen it in other languages. Funnily enough they were nowhere as ugly / noisy / complicated as Rust's is. Rust seems to have bolted on a lot of fancy shit that may be appealing to a lot of people and that is it.
In your link, the first one is fugly, the last one is fine. Maybe Rust just encourages ugly (i.e. complicated) code a bit too much.
As someone who mostly writes Clojure code professionally during the day, I agree, Rust's syntax is complicated for no good reason, ugly and overly-verbose. But then I think that about most Algol-like language too, not just Rust.
And despite that I do use Rust when I want something simple to deploy/deliver, as handing over a binary that just runs is such a nice experience, and it's real easy to make fast. As long as I don't have to maintain in long-term, Rust is fine for what it is.
I like Rust’s syntax and dislike Elixir/Ruby’s. I also prefer Erlang’s to Elixir, lol.
> It is still ugly / noisy / overly-complicated and probably could have been done better.
I don't know, it feels like you're just saying that you don't like it, missed the point of the post, and are not giving us anything concrete. Can you list a very clear example of how you'd improve the syntax?
Again, see the post: You can remove things, but you're losing explicitness or other things. If you want a language that's more implicit, this is fine. I don't.
> Can you list a very clear example of how you'd improve the syntax?
The demand that I must design a better language to have valid criticism is absurd - I don't need to be a chef to know food tastes bad, do I? I'm a user of languages, not a language designer. My job is to evaluate whether Rust's syntax serves my needs, not to solve the PL design problems that led to it.
The syntax is noisy. That's not "missing the point" - that's the direct consequence of the design choices you're defending. If your argument is "the complexity is necessary for memory safety" fine, but don't pretend the cost doesn't exist or that pointing it out is invalid.
You're conflating "can identify a problem" with "must solve the problem". Those are different skills. I'm evaluating Rust as a user, not auditioning as a language designer.
No, I just don't think you have identified a problem in the first place. You've complained a lot, but you've not even been specific enough to point at a single concrete thing! You've been so lacking in specifics I don't even know if you'd prefer Ocaml, Go, or Python-style syntax over Rust! Like, I can't tell since all you've said is that you don't like it, without even telling me how you don't like it or what you prefer!
You say "over-complicated". I disagree, my impression is that is mostly about as complicated as it needs to be to solve the problems it is trying to solve.
Symbol soup and layers of hell that is abstractions. A language in which it is valid syntax to have 6 symbols next to each other is a bad idea.
You do not have to know what programming language I prefer either[1]. Why would you?
[1] If you are curious, I have talked quite a lot about it, along with why I dislike Rust.
I'm actually fine with almost all the decisions that Rust made in terms of logic and concepts, but specifically don't like the synthax itself: the symbols, keywords like the consonant-only "fn" instead of "func" for instance, the fact that || {} starts a lambda instead of || -> void {}, the fact that you can return things by simply having them in an if branch. It's the main reason I don't use the language.
Most of those are a matter of preference, implicit return is just plain better, and it would be absolutely insane if closures required the return type to be specified. I do agree that the toilet bowl `|_|()` syntax is ugly, though.
Again, I think JS/Typescript has a better syntax, since the implicit syntax is better when unbranched, like x => expression, but it's harder to read the more branches there are, since it's hard to visually scan where results can be located.
> implicit return is just plain better
I really dislike them. Makes me wonder if you just got distracted and forgot to finish the function. Be explicit, don't make me have to spend time figuring it out.
Meh, if these are the main reasons you don't use the language, I don't know what to tell you. I get having preferences, but whether the keyword is `fn` or `func` is such a banal, trivial thing that doesn't matter at all.
Each taken individually is something I can ignore. But there are so many of them that it's no longer trivial to ignore.
They could have at least put the types on the left. Types on the right are a good fit for mathematics, where everything is single-letter symbols, so your eyes do not have to go across the line to see the entire definition, but in programming function definitions often span an entire line on screen, so the most important information should be the first thing shown! Also most programmers do not have formal education in mathematics, so the whole "function : domain -> image" syntax is foreign to them. We really should strive to democratise programming for everyone, rather than make it isolated to a small clique of "properly" educated white men who all went to the same university.
The type of a variable and the return type of a function are the most important pieces of information regarding those, so they ought to be on the left. It also fits the data flow going right to left (i.e. how the '=' operator works). C's type declarations can get pretty gnarly, so there is definitely room for improvement there. I would say Java (and C#) got it as close to perfect as possible.
If you want to replace C/C++ you should make your language look as inviting as possible to users of the old one. I truly think this strange fetish for putting types on the right is what gives C programmers the ick when they see Rust for the first time and is hampering its adoption.
After using C and Java for years and years I absolutely loved types on the right when I started using Scala. On the right just makes so much more sense to me, and I'm not a math guy.
Each to their own, I guess.
"if let" just breaks my brain, it feels backwards to me and takes me a minute each time to work out what's going on. In 40 years of programming I've never seen a syntactic construct that I found less intuitive. And it would probably be easily fixable, if it was more along the lines of "if x matches Some(let z)".
if let makes a lot more sense when you learn that a normal let expression also takes a pattern[1].
But this is intended for "exhaustive patterns". If you can't express an exhaustive pattern, like with an Option, then you can use let ... else if let is just an extension of this "let pattern" system.Once you internalize how patterns work (and they really work everywhere) it all starts to really make sense and feels a lot cleaner.
[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/patterns.html
as a beginner rust programmer, I agree. it takes me way longer to parse someone else's rust code than it does for me to read C or C++, even though I have about the same amount of experience with them. in that example, I had to look up what "if let Err() =" does, because it's not intuitive to me. it seems like every time I read rust code, I have to learn about some strange feature that's probably convenient when you know it, but there's a billion of them and they add up to hard to read code until you've spent tons and tons of time with rust. it's just so much to memorize compared to other languages.
I have the opposite experience: C++ is what I have the most experience with by a very wide margin, but I find reading other people's rust code way easier than other people's C++ code. There's way more weird features, language extensions and other crazy stuff in C++ land.
I think both Rust and C++ are behemoths. I do not even know what "proper" "modern" C++ is.
I believe you, I haven't contributed a lot of C++ code and it's quite possible the projects I have contributed to (e.g. godot engine) just happen to be written very legibly.
It reminds me the experience I had when working with Scala, I really tried to like it but the mind-boggling amount of features created similar issues.
It took me about 2 years to feel somewhat comfortable but I'd still run into code where someone decided to use their own set of unconventional favourite features, requiring me to learn yet-another-way to do the same thing I had seen done in other ways.
I just got tired of it, didn't feel more productive nor enlightened...
Don't understand this complaint about Rust, but I'll give you Scala. Never seen a language so finely tuned to empower architecture astronauts to make terrible decisions. And boy do they make terrible decisions.
It takes at most a week to get used to just about any syntax. It should absolutely never be a reason not to try a new language. That said, it would be lovely if Rust had a more ML-like, rather than C-like, syntax (being originally inspired by O’Caml), but that would likely not help attract devs in the intended target audience!
The insert function, for what it’s worth, has nonstandard formatting; the de facto standard rustfmt tool would use more newlines, making it clearer and less dense. The function also uses a couple of syntactic features like `if let`, which may seem unfamiliar at first but become second nature in a few days at most.
It probably takes a week to get used to ugly pants too. OP's point is a matter of aesthetic judgement. I don't mind it either, but = |&I: can| -> Agree { Rust::Syntax }; is.a(Bit(&mut chaotic);
I should probably have used something less ambivalent than "getting used to". There's certainly more elegance in Rust's semantics than syntax, but the latter doesn't really differ much from C, except for much better for loops, a sane declaration syntax (this is a BIG deal), and of course all the features that C just doesn't have, like closures^* Some of the syntax noise just has to be there in some way, to support the real deal which is the semantics.
^* I don't particularly enjoy the Ruby-borrowed || either, particularly because Alt-7 is a terrible key combination to type, but oh well.
Out of curiosity, what language specific keyboard requires alt-7 to enter the pipe symbol?
On the QWERTY keyboard, the pipe is near the enter key and easily typed.
Every time a language developer chooses to give their new language a novel, let alone chaotic, syntax, they sin against the very premise of software development being an engineering profession. Can you imagine the madness if mechanical engineers had the same laissez-faire mentality towards the conventions and learned best practices of their field? Randomly chosen bolts to use left hand threads just because it suits their arbitrary whim, every thread has a unique pitch never seen before just to make the machine stand out from the crowd. Parts of the machine use hot rivets, not because the design demands it but because it scratches a retro aesthetic itch the designer had that day. Every time a new machine is designed it has a whole class of new never before seen quirky ways of being put together and any mechanic who pleads for standardization on common sense ways of putting a thing together are just told to git gud because the creative expression of the 'engineers' is paramount.
(This is how we end up with German cars, isn't it?)
It's of course a matter of perspective, goals, and assumed knowledge. Is it choosing to not follow best practices, or leaving outdated practices with unfixable downsides behind? Is it inventing new things or instead actually just taking already-existing things that you just happened to not know about? Is it making arbitrary changes, or necessary ones for a useful goal? Is an extra bit of temporary pain for existing engineers worth making things better for all future engineers? (not to say that Rust has necessarily made all the right decisions; but alas basically nothing is perfect, and things certainly won't get better if noone tries)
> Every time a language developer chooses to give their new language a novel, let alone chaotic, syntax, they sin against the very premise of software development being an engineering profession.
Exactly which syntax should every language be using then? Everyone will give you a different answer.
> Randomly chosen bolts to use left hand threads just because it suits their arbitrary whim
Claiming the syntax was chosen randomly on a whim is very much not true: https://matklad.github.io/2023/01/26/rusts-ugly-syntax.html
And there are times when it does make sense to use left-hand threads.
Just because someone looks at new syntax and doesn't immediately understand it doesn't mean that syntax doesn't exist for good reason.
Also, if your language's constructs and semantics don't exactly match those in other languages, then giving them the same syntax would be actively misleading, and therefore a design flaw.
Syntax is also only an issue for people who haven't taken the time to learn the language. If you haven't learned the language, then familiar syntax isn't going to help you anyway. You'll just think you understand something you don't.
It's like asking if the world should standardize on left handed or right handed screws as a default. There comes a point where the choice matters less than picking one at all.
Screw handedness is something that's basically always fine either way if planned for, and with largely no benefit for either option, so standardizing that is easy enough.
But, like, even then, there's screw drive (JIS vs phillips vs pozidriv vs a ton more) to worry about with screws. (never mind the obvious aspects of diameter & length; and whatnot else I happen to not know about)
The significant thing I think is that such trivial impactless questions just do not exist for programming languages. Even like comment starting characters is a messy question - "//" nicely aligns with "/* */" using the slash char, but "#" is a char shorter and interpreted languages need to handle "#!" as a comment for shebangs anyways. And things only get more complicated from there.
And, unlike with physical things, it's trivial to work with non-standardized things in software. Not like you're gonna copy-paste arbitrary code from one language into another and just expect it's gonna work anyway (else we wouldn't have more than one language).
Bit that is more like standardizing on a language, not a syntax across languages.
I also don't think syntax is even a problem worth worrying about. It takes very little time to become accustomed to a new syntax. It's the semantics that are hard to learn. Difficulty syntax can often be helpful when learning a new language, as it serves as a reminder that the semantics are different.
Laughs in lisp
I've written Clojure professionally. It's exactly the language I had in mind when I said that it takes a week to get accustomed to. I find it a very clean and elegant language. Shame that it's dynamically typed.
Check out Common Lisp, it's gradually typed, so if you want you can just write your code like this:
It’s promises make me interested, but the syntax is my main turnoff. I am a Go person, and I think what brings people to go is the opposite of what brings people to Rust. I am willing to sacrifice some memory safety (because I maybe naively think I can manage to write software without many memory bugs) for the simplicity and dev experience that Go offers.
The first statement defines a closure. The second is an if-let statement. It's not chaotic, you're just unfamiliar with the syntax.
I actually find the Rust syntax very natural, more than C in some areas.
More than C? Highly doubt that.
Arrays are initialized with curly braces but the type notation uses brackets.
typedef takes the identifier at the end of the statement.
The asterisk is used to de-reference but used to denote a reference in types.
While loops may take the condition after the block.
tbh it's bit boring to get stuck on aesthetic of writing up something. It's a bit nauseous to see how this place is hostile to rust for no reason other than "it's not pretty". It's a joke at this point we could make caricature of HN viewpoint on rust. We get it, you don't like it.
HN is not some monolithic single perspective. There are plenty of Rust fans here, and they show up just as frequently as the complainers. In fact, there is overlap between the two groups. You can be a fan of a tech and still complain about its warts.
Oh come on, how many times have we seen "blazingly fast in Rust", "rewritten in Rust" etc.? Many times. We get it. You like Rust. This "rewrite in Rust" bullshit is just as nauseous and I am sick of seeing it, too. So what? In fact, it is quite a meme now.
Please, every time you see someone praise Rust (every other day), tell them the same as you have told me, just the opposite way around.
It really reads quite simply once you're familiar with the language. You only see chaos because there are none of the semantic hooks you'd get from experience
Everyone who tells me this, I would love them to write an useful project in Forth. ;)
Guess what? They would blame Forth, Common Lisp, etc., yet I could tell them the same things I am being told about Rust.
Forth and Common Lisp are demanding, but they demand different things of the novice programmer than Rust.
The latter's baroque syntax is not provably good or necessary, but I'd call it the other end of a compromise for safety and expressiveness. And once you learn it, you've learned much of the language by default.
Not so with with the first two! The mental models involved in reasoning about a piece of code require much more cognition on the part of the programmer.
Sounds like you are heavily biased in favor of Rust. What you said about Forth and Common Lisp applies to Rust, too, no matter how much you are trying to deny the reality of it. Just admit that you love Rust, and quite biased in favor of it.
I do like Rust quite a bit. I don't know Forth or Common Lisp as well, but I don't dislike them. I admit, I have learned very little about them from you so far.
You strike me as someone who isn't really prepared to have an actual debate on technical matters, because all you have done is:
- manufacture some fictional strawman who is complaining about languages you like
- tell me I'm wrong without even bothering to get into why
- claim that I'm biased, when all I've done is explain my opinion that all three languages are challenging in different ways
You claimed much more than that.
See your statement: "Not so with with the first two! The mental models involved in reasoning about a piece of code require much more cognition on the part of the programmer.".
Your whole comment is about favoring Rust over those two because Rust is your beloved language.
Additionally, it is not up to me to teach you Forth nor Common Lisp.
Finally, you should read your own comment where you replace Rust with Common Lisp, for example, and Forth and Common Lisp with Rust. You may see what I was referring to.
In fact, let me do it for you:
> Rust is demanding, but they demand different things of the novice programmer than Common Lisp. The latter's baroque syntax is not provably good or necessary, but I'd call it the other end of a compromise for safety and expressiveness. And once you learn it, you've learned much of the language by default.
> Not so much with Rust! The mental models involved in reasoning about a piece of code require much more cognition on the part of the programmer.
See it yet?
I find the short type names for integers and float hard to read. Somehow the size of the type is more important than if it is a signed integer, unsigned integer or a floating point number.
Using Vec for arrays is also annoying, repeating the mistake from C++.
> Using Vec for arrays is also annoying, repeating the mistake from C++.
Neither Rust nor C++ uses vectors as array, they're distinct things.
An array is a fixed-size object, which never allocates and its elements thus always retain their memory address. In Rust they're `[T; N]`, in C++ `T[N]` or more recently `std::array<T, N>`.
A vector on the other hand is dynamically sized object, that may (re)allocate to accomodate new elements, and the address of their elements can change. In Rust they're `Vec<T>`; in C++ `std::vector<T>`.
I'm aware of how they are used, but fundamentally there is nothing with the words "array" and "vector" that says that one has a fixed size and the other has a dynamic size. If anything, it should be the other way around. Using the name vector for dynamic arrays is annoying when doing any kind of math coding. Even the designer of STL says the name was a mistake.
I genuinely don't understand how you can find the type names for numbers hard to read, nor how you can say the size is treated as more important. The first thing in the type is what kind of number it is!
For me it is the usage of macros and traits everywhere.
Good luck if you want to get into the code of a library to understand what a function does. You have to go through 3 macros and 5 traits across 5 files. When it could have been just a couple function calls.
People don’t stop and think if they really need that trait or macro for five seconds, they just have to use it every time
I dislike macros for that reason when reading code on GitHub or Docs.rs, but Rust was kind of made to be used with an IDE (or LSP).
That is poor practice IMO. The simple reality of the world is that not everyone uses such tools. Designing a language with the expectation they will is deliberately ignoring the needs of some users.
IDEs were invented by a mix of XEROX PARC, Symbolics, TI efforts into graphical workstations development, we have moved beyond the point of refusal to adopt modern tooling.
The insert function is very unidiomatic. Instead of defining a cmp closure, you would typically implement Ord and friends.