librope
Nim
librope | Nim | |
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4 | 348 | |
265 | 16,133 | |
- | 0.8% | |
0.0 | 9.9 | |
over 2 years ago | 2 days ago | |
C | Nim | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
librope
- Show HN
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The case against an alternative to C
Yep. A few years ago I implemented a skip list based rope library in C[1], and after learning rust I eventually ported it over[2].
The rust implementation was much less code than the C version. It generated a bigger assembly but it ran 20% faster or so. (I don't know why it ran faster than the C version - this was before the noalias analysis was turned on in the compiler).
Its now about 3x faster than C, thanks to some use of clever layered data structures. I could implement those optimizations in C, but I find rust easier to work with.
C has advantages, but performance is a bad reason to choose C over rust. In my experience, the runtime bounds checks it adds are remarkably cheap from a performance perspective. And its more than offset by the extra optimizations the rust compiler can do thanks to the extra knowledge the compiler has about your program. If my experience is anything to go by, naively porting C programs to rust would result in faster code a lot of the time.
And I find it easier to optimize rust code compared to C code, thanks to generics and the (excellent) crates ecosystem. If I was optimizing for runtime speed, I'd pick rust over C every time.
[1] https://github.com/josephg/librope
[2] https://github.com/josephg/jumprope-rs
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Why Is C Faster Than Java (2009)
> it’s not clear if this will be a positive for native dev advocacy
I've rewritten a few things in rust. Seems pretty positive to me, because you can mix some of the best optimizations and data structures you'd write in C, with much better developer ergonomics.
A few years ago I wrote a rope library in C. This is a library for making very fast, arbitrary insert & delete operations in a large string. My C code was about as fast as I could make it at the time. But recently, I took a stab at porting it to Rust to see if I could improve things. Long story short, the rust version is another ~3x faster than the C version.
https://crates.io/crates/jumprope
(Vs in C: https://github.com/josephg/librope )
The competition absolutely isn't fair. In rust, I managed to add another optimization that doesn't exist in the C code. I could add it in C, but it would have been really awkward to weave in. Possible, but awkward in an already very complex bit of C. In rust it was much easier because of the language's ergonomics. In C I'm using lots of complex memory management and I don't want to add complexity in case I add memory corruption bugs. In rust, well, the optimization was entirely safe code.
And as for other languages - I challenge anyone to even approach this level of performance in a non-native language. I'm processing ~30M edit operations per second.
But these sort of performance results probably won't scale for a broader group of programmers. I've seen rust code run slower than equivalent javascript code because the programmers, used to having a GC, just Box<>'ed everything. And all the heap allocations killed performance. If you naively port python line-by-line to rust, you can't expect to magically get 100x the performance.
Its like, if you give a top of the line Porsche to an expert driver, they can absolutely drive faster. But I'm not an expert driver, so I'll probably crash the darn thing. I'd take a simple toyota or something any day. I feel like rust is the porsche, and python is the toyota.
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Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks
> I have no idea whether that matters or even easy to measure...
It is reasonably easy to measure, and the GP is about right. I've measured a crossover point of around a few hundred items too. (Though I'm sure it'll vary depending on use case and whatnot.)
I made a rope data structure a few years ago in C. Its a fancy string data structure which supports inserts and deletes of characters at arbitrary offsets. (Designed for text editors). The implementation uses a skip list (which performs similarly to a b-tree). At every node we store an array of characters. To insert or delete, we traverse the structure to find the node at the requested offset, then (usually) memmove a bunch of characters at that node.
Q: How large should that per-node array be? A small number would put more burden on the skip list structure and the allocator, and incur more cache misses. A large number will be linearly slower because of all the time spent in memmove.
Benchmarking shows the ideal number is in the ballpark of 100-200, depending on CPU and some specifics of the benchmark itself. Cache misses are extremely expensive. Storing only a single character at each node (like the SGI C++ rope structure does) makes it run several times slower. (!!)
Code: https://github.com/josephg/librope
This is the constant to change if you want to experiment yourself:
https://github.com/josephg/librope/blob/81e1938e45561b0856d4...
In my opinion, hash tables, btrees and the like in the standard library should probably swap to flat lists internally when the number of items in the collection is small. I'm surprised more libraries don't do that.
Nim
- The search for easier safe systems programming
- 3 years of fulltime Rust game development, and why we're leaving Rust behind
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Top Paying Programming Technologies 2024
22. Nim - $80,000
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"14 Years of Go" by Rob Pike
I think the right answer to your question would be NimLang[0]. In reality, if you're seeking to use this in any enterprise context, you'd most likely want to select the subset of C++ that makes sense for you or just use C#.
[0]https://nim-lang.org/
- Odin Programming Language
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Ask HN: Interest in a Rust-Inspired Language Compiling to JavaScript?
I don't think it's a rust-inspired language, but since it has strong typing and compiles to javascript, did you give a look at nim [0] ?
For what it takes, I find the language very expressive without the verbosity in rust that reminds me java. And it is also very flexible.
[0] : https://nim-lang.org/
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The nim website and the downloads are insecure
I see a valid cert for https://nim-lang.org/
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Nim
FYI, on the front page, https://nim-lang.org, in large type you have this:
> Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula.
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Things I've learned about building CLI tools in Python
You better off with using a compiled language.
If you interested in a language that's compiled, fast, but as easy and pleasant as Python - I'd recommend you take a look at [Nim](https://nim-lang.org).
And to prove what Nim's capable of - here's a cool repo with 100+ cli apps someone wrote in Nim: [c-blake/bu](https://github.com/c-blake/bu)
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Mojo is now available on Mac
Chapel has at least several full-time developers at Cray/HPE and (I think) the US national labs, and has had some for almost two decades. That's much more than $100k.
Chapel is also just one of many other projects broadly interested in developing new programming languages for "high performance" programming. Out of that large field, Chapel is not especially related to the specific ideas or design goals of Mojo. Much more related are things like Codon (https://exaloop.io), and the metaprogramming models in Terra (https://terralang.org), Nim (https://nim-lang.org), and Zig (https://ziglang.org).
But Chapel is great! It has a lot of good ideas, especially for distributed-memory programming, which is its historical focus. It is more related to Legion (https://legion.stanford.edu, https://regent-lang.org), parallel & distributed Fortran, ZPL, etc.
What are some alternatives?
c2rust - Migrate C code to Rust
zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
mu - Soul of a tiny new machine. More thorough tests → More comprehensible and rewrite-friendly software → More resilient society.
go - The Go programming language
c3c - Compiler for the C3 language
Odin - Odin Programming Language
proposal-explicit-resource-management - ECMAScript Explicit Resource Management
rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
jumprope-rs
crystal - The Crystal Programming Language
buffet - All-inclusive Buffer for C
v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io