ring VS rustc-perf

Again, this is just a temporary situation, and a matter of burning down a list of small tasks. Not that the OpenSSL license issue is a big deal for most anyway. Feel free to help; see this issue filed by Josh Triplett: https://github.com/briansmith/ring/issues/1318#issuecomment-...

Note also that rustls depends on ring, which has architecture-dependent code in it that is not as widely compatible as eg. OpenSSL/GnuTLS/Mbed-TLS. For example, MIPS is not supported by ring.

The AWS Rust library we were using as a dependency depended on a cryptography library called ring. This library leverages C and assembly code to implement its cryptographic primitives. Unfortunately, cross compiling when C is involved can add complexity to the build process. While it might've been possible to overcome these issues I decided that it wasn't worth digging into more.

That'd be great. Thanks Brian. Re: making ring portable to all platforms: IBM have been graciously maintaining a up to date patchset for Ring for years now and there's an outstanding PR here you may not have seen since they filed it in 2020... https://github.com/briansmith/ring/pull/1057

Beyond the simple matter of Rust being much newer than OpenSSL, one concern for some cryptographic primitives is the timing side-channel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack

In high level languages like Rust, the compiler does not prioritise trying to emit machine code which executes in constant time for all inputs. OpenSSL has implementations for some primitives which are known to be constant time, which can be important.

One option if you're working with Rust anyway would be use something like Ring:

https://github.com/briansmith/ring

Ring's primitives are just taken from BoringSSL which is Google's fork of OpenSSL, they're a mix of C and assembly language, it's possible (though fraught) to write some constant time algorithms in C if you know which compiler will be used, and of course it's possible (if you read the performance manuals carefully) to write constant time assembly in many cases.

In the C / assembly language code of course you do not have any safety benefits.

It can certainly make sense to do this very tricky primitive stuff in dangerous C or assembly, but then write all the higher level stuff in Rust, and that's the sort of thing Ring is intended for. BoringSSL for example includes code to do X.509 parsing and signature validation in C, but those things aren't sensitive, a timing attack on my X.509 parsing tells you nothing of value, and it's complicated to do correctly so Rust could make sense.

machine learning, neural networks, image processing, cryptography (though it is getting better), font shaping/rendering (though it is getting better), CPU/software rendering (though it is getting better)

> what do people use to run benchmarks on CI?

Typically, you purchase/rent a server that does nothing but sequentially run queued benchmarks (and the size/performance of this server doesn't really matter, as long as the performance is consistent), then sends the report somewhere for hosting and processing. Of course, this could be triggered by something running in CI, and the CI job could wait for the results, if benchmarking is an important part of your workflow.

But CI and benchmarks really shouldn't be run on the same host.

> What does the rust project use?

It's not clear exactly where the Rust benchmark "perf-runner" is hosted, but here are the specifications of the machine at least: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-perf/blob/414230abc695bd7...

> What do other projects use?

Essentially what I described above, a dedicated machine that runs benchmarks. The Rust project seems to do it via GitHub comments (as I understand https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-perf/tree/master/collecto...), others have API servers that respond to HTTP requests done from CI/chat, others have remote GUIs that triggers the runs. I don't think there is a single solution that everyone/most are using.

A lot of effort is spent to reduce the size of structs in the Rust compiler

https://nnethercote.github.io/2023/03/24/how-to-speed-up-the...

3% and 6% of improvement doesn't seem like much, but at the level of rustc those big wins

Performance of Rustc must be continously tracked (here https://perf.rust-lang.org/) because if you don't proactively fight against bloat, the tendency is that the code will become slower over time (due to new features etc)

hmm really really hard to answer :'), it's tradeoffs I think, no matter what you think Rust (cmiiw, I'm not qualified to say this) has (and probably in the future will adds more with guards on compiler metrics https://perf.rust-lang.org/) several phases that given the diffs to other language, might not available to any language compiler out there, if it's available I think rustc already did their best in here (some already being parallized etc etc, might be wrong since I can't refs any reference MRs, but it does exists though labels regarding this)

About a year ago I was looking for a tool like Rust perf for my application code. I did some research and found a lot of prior art. However, nothing checked all the boxes I was looking for, so I built Bencher!

https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity... is a good overview. In general it varies depending on the crate but we track the performance at https://perf.rust-lang.org/ - if you look at cargo, for example, over 60% of the time is spent in codegen through LLVM: https://perf.rust-lang.org/detailed-query.html?commit=222d1f...

Something like https://perf.rust-lang.org/?

The performance full-report link is dead: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-perf/blob/master/triage/2022-10-04.md