arewefastyet VS Rust-for-Linux

That page averages all the builds across different code bases. It doesn’t specify which version/tag of which code base, nor does it talk about the hardware.

https://arewefastyet.pages.dev/ - This page tracks compile times across some common crates over all supported compiler versions, with different hardware (2, 4, 8, 16 cores). This used to be https://arewefastyet.rs but the domain expired.

https://arewefastyet.rs/ see benchmark

You can check incremental compile times on http://arewefastyet.rs. Choose one compile mode (Debug OR Release, preferably Debug), one hardware config (4 cores let's say) and both profile modes (Clean, Incremental).

Compile times in rustc have been steadily improving with time, as shown here - https://arewefastyet.rs.

Every release doesn't make every workload faster, but over a long time horizon, the effect is clear. Rust 1.34 was released in April 2019 and since then many crates have become 33-50% faster to compile, depending on the hardware and the compiler mode (clean/incremental, check/debug/release).

Interestingly, the speedup mentioned in OP won't show up in these charts because that's a change on macOS and these benchmarks were recorded on Linux.

What is expected to be a gamechanger is the release of cranelift in 2021 or 2022. It's an alternate debug backend that promises much faster debug builds.

Yes plenty of effort goes into making Rust compilation faster, see https://arewefastyet.rs/, its FAQ, and some easy internet searches.

Thanks for your work on arewefastyet.rs, I was about to post a link to it haha

I implemented something similar. Deserialising a comma separated strings into a struct - example. Hope that helps!

Rust is backwards compatible when you stick to stable features, but the kernel uses unstable features that can and do incur breaking changes.

https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/2

> How would this work?

Don't know exactly what you're asking.

> And why would it be a better idea?

Poorly written device drivers are a significant attack vector. It's one of the reasons Linux is now exploring using Rust for its own device drivers.[0] You may be asking -- why Rust and not some other language? Rust has many of the performance and interoperability advantages of C and C++, but as noted, makes certain classes of memory safety issues impossible. Rust also has significant mindshare among systems programming communities.

[0]: https://rust-for-linux.com

Ctrl-F "rust"

https://rust-for-linux.com/ links to LWN articles at https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/#Development_tools-Rust that suggest that only basic modules are yet possible with the rust support in Linux kernels 6.2 and 6.3.

Rust-for-linux links to the Android binder module though:

> Android Binder Driver: This project is an effort to rewrite Android's Binder kernel driver in Rust.

> Motivation: Binder is one of the most security and performance critical components of Android. Android isolates apps from each other and the system by assigning each app a unique user ID (UID). This is called "application sandboxing", and is a fundamental tenet of the Android Platform Security Model.

> The majority of inter-process communication (IPC) on Android goes through Binder. Thus, memory unsafety vulnerabilities are especially critical when they happen in the Binder driver

... "Rust in the Linux kernel" (2021) https://security.googleblog.com/2021/04/rust-in-linux-kernel... :

> [...] We also need designs that allow code in the two languages to interact with each other: we're particularly interested in safe, zero-cost abstractions that allow Rust code to use kernel functionality written in C, and how to implement functionality in idiomatic Rust that can be called seamlessly from the C portions of the kernel.

> Since Rust is a new language for the kernel, we also have the opportunity to enforce best practices in terms of documentation and uniformity. For example, we have specific machine-checked requirements around the usage of unsafe code: for every unsafe function, the developer must document the requirements that need to be satisfied by callers to ensure that its usage is safe; additionally, for every call to unsafe functions (or usage of unsafe constructs like dereferencing a raw pointer), the developer must document the justification for why it is safe to do so.

> We'll now show how such a driver would be implemented in Rust, contrasting it with a C implementation. [...]

This guide with unsafe rust that calls into the C, and then with next gen much safer rust right next to it would be a helpful resource too.

What of the post-docker container support (with userspaces also written in go) should be cloned to rust first?

Rust-for-Linux issue tracker

Yes, I definitely agree that it's a problem that pr_info implicitly wraps its arguments in unsafe {}. I wrote my own Pull Request with a trival fix.

Note that this template won't work with Linux 6.1, which has very minimal Rust support. You'll want the RustForLinux tree, or maybe Linux 6.2.

You can join Rust for Linux zulip chat by requesting invite using the link in https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux 's README.