Rust continues to top the charts as the most admired and desired language by developers, and in this post, we dive a little deeper into how (and why) Rust is stealing the hearts of developers around the world.
The existence of undefined behaviour does not at all help performance. Those unnecessary if-checks are mostly a myth and even when they are introduced (e.g. bounds-checks when indexing arrays), they are usually outweight by the advantages of disallowing aliasing (references can be used much more “carelessly” without rutime checks, because these checks happen at compile time by default, comlilers can generally optimize code better because they know more about aliasing of specific data or the lack thereof). In larger, modern c++ projects a lot of smart pointers are used to enforce similar aliasing rules, which are then enforced at runtime though. Generally, the lack of undefined behaviour enables both programmers and compilers to design, architect and optimize code better. There are enough examples out there. Cloudflares in-house proxy solution comes to mind, which is written in rust and easily beats nginx (!!), serving billions of requests per day.
https://lists.isocpp.org/std-proposals/2023/08/7587.php gives one example where it does. Rust defines what happens for a case that is clearly nonsense, thus rust needs check for that case (on processors where the CPU does something different) even though if you get into it you have a bug in your code.
I don’t doubt that you can easily craft micro benchmarks out of very specific cases. My point was, that in real world applications, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages easily! And in a very tight loop of performance critical code where this might not be the case, you can still use unsafe and disable checks very carefully where you control the invariants yourself.
And, even more importantly: Depending on the use case, that work is not wasted! “You have a bug in your code” is very possible (more unlikely in rust due to its design, but still). If that bug triggers UB, chances are high you habe an exploitable security problem there. If it instead triggers a panic due to rusts checks, the app stopps in a clean way with a decent message and without a security vulnerability.
The existence of undefined behaviour does not at all help performance. Those unnecessary if-checks are mostly a myth and even when they are introduced (e.g. bounds-checks when indexing arrays), they are usually outweight by the advantages of disallowing aliasing (references can be used much more “carelessly” without rutime checks, because these checks happen at compile time by default, comlilers can generally optimize code better because they know more about aliasing of specific data or the lack thereof). In larger, modern c++ projects a lot of smart pointers are used to enforce similar aliasing rules, which are then enforced at runtime though. Generally, the lack of undefined behaviour enables both programmers and compilers to design, architect and optimize code better. There are enough examples out there. Cloudflares in-house proxy solution comes to mind, which is written in rust and easily beats nginx (!!), serving billions of requests per day.
https://lists.isocpp.org/std-proposals/2023/08/7587.php gives one example where it does. Rust defines what happens for a case that is clearly nonsense, thus rust needs check for that case (on processors where the CPU does something different) even though if you get into it you have a bug in your code.
I don’t doubt that you can easily craft micro benchmarks out of very specific cases. My point was, that in real world applications, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages easily! And in a very tight loop of performance critical code where this might not be the case, you can still use unsafe and disable checks very carefully where you control the invariants yourself.
And, even more importantly: Depending on the use case, that work is not wasted! “You have a bug in your code” is very possible (more unlikely in rust due to its design, but still). If that bug triggers UB, chances are high you habe an exploitable security problem there. If it instead triggers a panic due to rusts checks, the app stopps in a clean way with a decent message and without a security vulnerability.