min-sized-rust VS smartstring

Who knows what they did, but there are things which can be done: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

> By default, Rust optimizes for execution speed, compilation speed, and ease of debugging rather than binary size, since for the vast majority of applications this is ideal. But for situations where a developer wants to optimize for binary size instead, Rust provides mechanisms to accomplish this.

https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust?tab=readme-ov-f...

You can get Rust binaries pretty small: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

But in practice it's more like there's an overhead for "hello world" but it's a fixed overhead. So it's really only a problem where you have lots of binaries, e.g. for coreutils. The solution there is a multi-call binary like Busybox that switches on argv[0].

C programs often seem small because you don't see the size of their dependencies directly, but they obviously still take up disk space. In some cases they can be shared but actually the amount of disk space this saves is not very big except for things like libc (which Rust dynamically links) and maybe big libraries like Qt, GTK, X11.

This is a good guide on building small Rust binaries: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

This talks about going to extreme lengths on making the smallest Rust binary possible, 400 bytes when it was written, https://darkcoding.net/software/a-very-small-rust-binary-ind...

The thing is, you lose a lot of nice features when you do this, like panic unwinding, debug symbols, stdlib… for kernel and some embedded development it’s definitely important, but for most use cases, does it matter?

Oh it was 137, haha. I will link you to this older comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29408906

See also https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

Are you sure? If so then this is awesome news, but I'm a bit confused; the commit in that min-sized-rust repo adding `build-std` to the README was merged in August 2021: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust/pull/30

Are you saying that at that point the feature still hadn't "landed in Rust nightly" until recently? If so then what's the difference between a feature just being available in Rust nightly, vs having "landed"?

Rust binaries are by default nowhere close to 500MB. If they are not small enough for you, you can try https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust. By avoiding the formatting machinery and using `panic_immediate_abort` you can get about the size of C binaries.

A useful reference: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

> “short string optimization”: A short enough string can be stored “in place” [...] An optimization that’s impossible in Rust, by the way ;).

Author is not aware of https://docs.rs/compact_str/latest/compact_str/ or https://github.com/bodil/smartstring

Your use case sounds like it will involve a lot of small strings that use a subset of UTF-8. If you’re concerned about performance, you could look into something like smartstring. Sixbit also looks interesting, but it looks like it won’t give you any more characters and it’d probably require additional computation to do the conversion (and they’d have to be converted back out).

> If you have a long-running async function, then pass parameters by value! If you have a polymorphic async function, then return your result in a Box.

I've taken to making heavy use of the smallvec and smartstring crates for this. Most lists and strings are small in practice. Using smallvec / smartstring lets you keep most clone() calls allocation-free. This in turn lets you use owned objects, which are easier to reason about - for you and the borrow checker. And you keep a lot of the performance of just passing around references.

I tried to use async rust a couple of years ago, and fell on my face in the process. Most of my rust at the moment is designed to compile to wasm - and then I'm leaning on nodejs for networking and IO. Writing async networked code is oh so much easier to reason about in javascript. When GAT, TAIT and some other language features to fix async land I'll muster up the courage to make another attempt. But rust's progress at fixing these problems feels painfully slow.

https://crates.io/crates/smallvec / https://crates.io/crates/smartstring

Just to point out, smartstring no longer assumes String memory layout. From the changelog:

There's some really good crates that implement SSO floating around - eg, SmartString. But I agree - its a pity they're needed. Swift built this into the core string type in the language. I think that was the right call.

Comparatively: * SmolStr can inline up to 22 bytes but does not adjust down for 32-bit architectures, meaning it's potentially wasting memory on 32-bit archs. Similarly though it's immutable and Clone is O(1) * SmartString can inline up to 23 bytes, but it's mutable and Clone is O(n). Also this crate makes assumptions about the memory layout of a String, which in theory should be fine, but is a slight caveat.

SmartString is used to store identifiers (which tends to be short, fewer than 23 characters, and ASCII-based) because they can usually be stored inline. Map keys now also use SmartString.

I’ve been using smartstrings, which is both excellent and maintained. https://github.com/bodil/smartstring