rust_serialization_benchmark VS unsafe-code-guidelines

https://github.com/djkoloski/rust_serialization_benchmark

Apache/arrow-rs: https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs

From https://arrow.apache.org/faq/ :

> How does Arrow relate to Flatbuffers?

> Flatbuffers is a low-level building block for binary data serialization. It is not adapted to the representation of large, structured, homogenous data, and does not sit at the right abstraction layer for data analysis tasks.

> Arrow is a data layer aimed directly at the needs of data analysis, providing a comprehensive collection of data types required to analytics, built-in support for “null” values (representing missing data), and an expanding toolbox of I/O and computing facilities.

> The Arrow file format does use Flatbuffers under the hood to serialize schemas and other metadata needed to implement the Arrow binary IPC protocol, but the Arrow data format uses its own representation for optimal access and computation

Nice that comfy gets even easier. Also, if serde's compile time is an issue, then there's nanoserde which is usually much much faster according to benchmarks

A note on performance and size: Some benchmarks and statistics are included in the README. But only because people will be curious. I've based my methodology on rust_serialization_benchmark, but decided to not extend it (for now) since it seems to exclude any Rust types which are not widely supported by all formats being tested (like HashMap's and 128-bit numbers). The test suite is already quite nice if you want to take it for a spin.

While we haven't benchmarked either of those ourselves. You can checkout rust_serialization_benchmark which has protobuf under the name prost.

Update: Benchmark PR submitted: https://github.com/djkoloski/rust_serialization_benchmark/pull/37

Here is a speed and size benchmark of different rust binary serialization formats: https://github.com/djkoloski/rust_serialization_benchmark Warning: I think the creator of this benchmark is also the creator of rkyv, one of the best positioned formats in the benchmark.

So I assume you're deserializing them before processing the book? If so then if you want an easy speed-up you could also take a look at these benchmarks and pick a faster serialization crate. (: (Although you might or might not get a big speedup; depends on what exactly you're deserializing and how much you are deserializing.)

You can add the rust serialization benchmark to that list

Hey! Similar to bincode, it provides a very similar, compact binary format. The rkyv benchmark is the most comprehensive I'm aware of, but compared to bincode, postcard is generally a similar speed for serialization or deserialization (maybe a touch slower), but generally produces a slightly smaller "on the wire" size.

You should add your crate to these benchmarks. (Which are, AFAIK, the most comprehensive set of benchmarks currently available for Rust serialization libraries.)

Useful context on the Rust side is this issue [1]. It sounds like some of the author's concerns are addressed already.

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/unsafe-code-guidelines/issues/4...

Is this captured by one of the known soundness conflicts? If not then should consider adding it to the list.

There are some competing proposals for different memory models. Stacked borrows is the current proposal, but there are more work in the approproate WG.

Thank you /u/RalfJung for bringing formal methods to Rust, both through models like Stacked Borrows, by developing miri, and by working on unsafe-code-guidelines which aims to specify exactly what is and isn't allowed in unsafe code (surprisingly, it's an open question as 2023!)

You could imagine some way to make this safe for example automatically convert &'short &'long mut T to &'short &'short T, but it's non-trivial to prove they are safe at all, not to mention ensuring this is correctly implemented in the compiler. If you're interested there's also a discussion on whether the opposite (& & T to & &mut T) is sound here.

Agreed! MIRI is so good, it still feels like magic to me. It also comforts me that the Rust team takes improving unsafe semantics seriously, with the past Unsafe Code Guidelines WG and today's operational semantics team (t-opsem).

I think there are some aspects of this rule that are still undecided. See for example:

- https://github.com/rust-lang/unsafe-code-guidelines/issues/8...

- https://github.com/rust-lang/miri/issues/2732

C is much better specified than unsafe Rust. Some things are just not worked out yet in Rust. This may sometimes even bite very experienced devs, such as this issue with Box's aliasing semantics, which tripped up the author of left-right.