miniserde VS mrustc

It's pretty common to avoid macros as they can seem too magical a lot of the time. And with traits, there's experiments like miniserde which specifically avoid monomorphization overhead. I also see people who want to avoid having lots of dependencies relatively often.

Right now, the next step would be to try to reimplement miniserde with venial, and publish benchmarks.

The only downside is compile time bloat.

Serde generates heaps and heaps of generic code. This gets optimized away to be very efficient, but it can be quite cumbersome.

Ever tried working on a crate with hundreds or thousands of de/serializable types? Compile times shoot through the roof really quickly.

The maintainer of serde also created `miniserde` [1], which uses dynamic dispatch and can have 4x compile time improvements.

Due to Rusts lack of orphan instances you really depend on a pervasive standard for serializiation which is used by all libraries, so the ecosystem is really locked in to serde by now.

[1] https://github.com/dtolnay/miniserde

No, you don't. Existential proof: mrustc ignores lifetimes. Just flat out simply ignores. It changes some corner-cases related to HRBT, yet rustc compiled by mrustc works (that's BTW mrustc exist: to bootsrap the rustc compiler).

Incidentally C++ is the only way to bootstrap rust without rust today.

https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

Well, there is mrustc[0], a Rust compiler that doesn't include a borrow-checker, so it's possible to compile (at least some versions of) Rust without a borrow checker, though it might not result in the most optimized code.

AFAIK there are some optimization like the infamous `noalias` optimization (which took several tries to get turned on[1]) that uses information established during borrow checking.

I'm also not sure what the relation with NLL (non-lexical lifetimes) is, where I would assume you would need at least a primitive borrow-checker to establish some information that the backend might be interested in. Then again, mrustc compiles Rust versions that have NLL features without a borrow-checker, so it's again probably more on the optimization side than being essential.

[0]: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57259339

> Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency.

It is possible to bootstrap rustc from just GCC relatively easily, although it's a little bit time consuming.

You can use mrustc to bootstrap Rust 1.54: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

And from then you can go through each version all the way to the current 1.72. (Each new Rust version officially needs the previous one to compile.)

Have you tried this route : https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc ?

Mrustc supports Rust 1.54.0 today

There are three. The official one, mrustc (no borrow checker, but can essentially compile the official rustc) and GCC (can't really compile anything substantial yet). Only rustc is production-ready though.

That probably depends on what you mean by problematic. Having an ever increasing chain of dependencies isn’t the most desirable situation so there has been some work to trim the bootstrap chain. In 2018, when the blogpost I linked above was written, mrustc was used to bootstrap rust 1.19.0; now mrustc can bootstrap rust 1.54.0 so the chain to recent versions is much shorter than if all those intervening versions back through 1.19.0 needed to be built. https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc