prometheus-cpp VS libcxx

Rust does have some very cool mechanisms for safety, including in the presence of concurrency.

But this thread is generating blowback from someone saying: “slow down there with the hand-rolled atomic operations, you can hand-roll your multi-threaded locking strategy and it’ll be way safer at a modest cost!”

So, probably not the target audience for Rust ;)

I use a lot of C++ still because there are libraries I want and I have a significant investment in existing code, but I’d love to get to something more modern.

Hand-rolled atomics and load/store relaxation in application code make even seasoned C++ hackers a bit nervous: we saw this shit from business logic hackers at FB all the time and my colleague coined the term “aggressively intermediate” for the style.

I don’t mean to pick on the author of a quite good library (and it is quite good), but I ran across this the other day:

https://github.com/jupp0r/prometheus-cpp/blob/master/core/sr...

It’s correct (I think, very easy to be wrong about this sort of thing), but what are we measuring here where we can’t delegate that CAS into pthread? Branch mispredictions?

Either threads are fighting over whatever cache line that’s on (exclusive -> invalid -> exclusive -> invalid), or not. If they are, I’ve just deprived the scheduler of the opportunity to wake me up when the other 59 threads are done. If they’re not, I’ve maybe saved like one line in my L1.

And in something like a metrics library, you could be wrong for a very long time before someone pinned it down.

Some metric collecting tool, for example, Prometheus and its client library for C++

You can use https://github.com/jupp0r/prometheus-cpp (your custom data) in combination with https://grafana.com/ that has plugins for things like cpu usage.

Grafana and Prometheus is what I’d use if you’re deploying this in Kubernetes. I haven’t used the C++ library, but generally you can just add a Prometheus client library (e.g. https://github.com/jupp0r/prometheus-cpp ) which makes it quite easy to instrument your application and expose metrics via HTTP. Then you need to configure Prometheus to scrape metrics from your application.

If you are comparing hoops that library authors need to jump through in both languages, you can easily make the real-world comparison in the other direction, by comparing Rust's Option with C++'s std::optional (an exercise left for the reader): Rust std: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/library/core/src/option.rs libcxx: https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/master/include/optional

My favorite prime number generator is the undocumented __next_prime():

https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/78d6a7767ed57b501...

There is no good reason to use this one except in a code golf environment that includes all headers by default, which is where I learned about it.

I once read a Strousroup quote amounting to "If you understand std::vector, then you understand C++". I thought surely he couldn't have meant the interface but the implentation, googled that llvm's implementation is considered nice and clean, had a look, and noped straight out of there.

C++'s STL linked list for comparison (libcxx).

https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/master/include/li...

> For example, accessing a std::span or a std::vector outside of its bounds would abort the program, and so would accessing an empty std::optional.

I don't really understand the difference with libc++, libstdc++ and msvc stl's respective debug modes, they already do exactly these checks :

- https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/78d6a7767ed57b501...

- https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/966010b2eb4a4c52f139b...

I mean it's not hard to read the source for your platform. On Linux/x86_64/libc++ it's roughly:

- https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/master/include/__...

- https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob_plain;f=nptl/...

I don't particularly care to comb through it to see if anything has changed, but historically it was a a little spin-CAS to make the non-contended path fast and then dropping into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futex, which is about as good as it gets for staying mostly in userspace but still letting it be scheduler aware so you're not burning up a core busy-polling, which is what often happens when people try to roll their own shit.

Google wants a bit more latitude on the heuristics and degrees of freedom around read/write ownership, so they did it like this: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/synchr... which is quite a bit better commented/legible.

If anyone reading this can do better than the `abseil-cpp` folks, not only would Google take their PR, they'd probably offer them a job.