Yeah, sorting is definitely a common use case, but note it also didn’t improve every sorting use case. Anyway, even if I’m a bit skeptical I trust the Rust team that they don’t take these decisions lightly.

But the thing that lead to my original question was: if the compiler itself uses the std sorting internally, there’s also additional reason to hope that it might have transitive performance benefits. So even if compiling the Rust compiler with this PR was actually slower, compiling again with the resulting compiler could be faster since the resulting compiler benefits from faster sorting. So yeah, fingers crossed 🤞

Yeah, it was the first line of the linked PR:

This PR replaces the sort implementations with tailor-made ones that strike a balance of run-time, compile-time and binary-size, yielding run-time and compile-time improvements.

It was also repeated a few paragraphs later that the motivation for the changes was both runtime and compile time improvements. So a little bit bumped to hear the compile time impact wasn’t as good as the authors hoped apparently. I’m not even sure I fully endorse the tradeoff, because it seems the gains, while major, only affect very select use cases, while the regressions seem to affect everyone and hurt in an area that is already perceived as a pain point. But oh well, the total regression is still minor so I guess we’ll live with it.

The post mentioned that the introduction of these new algorithms brings compile-time improvements too, so how should I see this? I assumed it meant that compiling applications that use sorting would speed up, but that seems like a meaningless improvement if overall compilation times have regressed. Or do you mean compiling the compiler has become slower?

Does the Rust compiler use their std sort algorithms, or does it already use specialized ones? If the former, it would be a great side-effect if the compiler itself receives additional speed ups because of this.

From what I understand as I skimmed over the stable sort analysis (https://github.com/Voultapher/sort-research-rs/blob/main/writeup/driftsort_introduction/text.md), it lost out against driftsort.

For a little bit I thought this library might be a subtle joke, seeing the #define _SHITPRESS_H at the start. That combined with the compress() and decompress() not taking any arguments and not having a return value, I thought we were being played. Not to mention the library appears to be plain C rather than C++… surely the author should know the difference?

Then I saw how the interface actually works:

// interface for the library user, implement these in your program:
unsigned int SPR_in(); // Return next byte from input or value > 255 on EOF.
void SPR_out(unsigned char); // Output byte.

This seems extremely poorly thought out. Calling into global functions for input and output means that your library will be a pain to use in any program that has to (de)compress anything more than a single input.

The System76 scheduler helps to tune for better desktop responsiveness under high load: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler I think if you use Pop!OS this may be set up out-of-the-box.

Essentially, but it doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely 😅

Smart pointers are really really nice, I do recommend getting used to them (and all other features from c++11 forward).

You’re recommending him to give up his sanity and/or life?

And conversely, something Go is very bad at. For example, os.Chmod silently not doing anything on Windows.

Of course, technically you can compile anything to almost anything. But I don’t think linking to a project that’s unmaintained for 15 years really helps your argument.