rustc-perf VS bevy

> what do people use to run benchmarks on CI?

Typically, you purchase/rent a server that does nothing but sequentially run queued benchmarks (and the size/performance of this server doesn't really matter, as long as the performance is consistent), then sends the report somewhere for hosting and processing. Of course, this could be triggered by something running in CI, and the CI job could wait for the results, if benchmarking is an important part of your workflow.

But CI and benchmarks really shouldn't be run on the same host.

> What does the rust project use?

It's not clear exactly where the Rust benchmark "perf-runner" is hosted, but here are the specifications of the machine at least: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-perf/blob/414230abc695bd7...

> What do other projects use?

Essentially what I described above, a dedicated machine that runs benchmarks. The Rust project seems to do it via GitHub comments (as I understand https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-perf/tree/master/collecto...), others have API servers that respond to HTTP requests done from CI/chat, others have remote GUIs that triggers the runs. I don't think there is a single solution that everyone/most are using.

A lot of effort is spent to reduce the size of structs in the Rust compiler

https://nnethercote.github.io/2023/03/24/how-to-speed-up-the...

3% and 6% of improvement doesn't seem like much, but at the level of rustc those big wins

Performance of Rustc must be continously tracked (here https://perf.rust-lang.org/) because if you don't proactively fight against bloat, the tendency is that the code will become slower over time (due to new features etc)

hmm really really hard to answer :'), it's tradeoffs I think, no matter what you think Rust (cmiiw, I'm not qualified to say this) has (and probably in the future will adds more with guards on compiler metrics https://perf.rust-lang.org/) several phases that given the diffs to other language, might not available to any language compiler out there, if it's available I think rustc already did their best in here (some already being parallized etc etc, might be wrong since I can't refs any reference MRs, but it does exists though labels regarding this)

About a year ago I was looking for a tool like Rust perf for my application code. I did some research and found a lot of prior art. However, nothing checked all the boxes I was looking for, so I built Bencher!

https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity... is a good overview. In general it varies depending on the crate but we track the performance at https://perf.rust-lang.org/ - if you look at cargo, for example, over 60% of the time is spent in codegen through LLVM: https://perf.rust-lang.org/detailed-query.html?commit=222d1f...

Something like https://perf.rust-lang.org/?

The performance full-report link is dead: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-perf/blob/master/triage/2022-10-04.md

Missing one of the best choices as long as "maturity" isn't on the top of your list: Bevy - https://bevyengine.org/

Game engine written in Rust, leveraging ECS in almost every place and way, with a really capable WASM export option. Wrestling ECS for the first time might take you some time, but in my experience helps you keep game code as clean and decoupled as game code could be.

I don't see WASM/WebGPU changing anything when it comes to gaming, as an industry, personally. 3d visualizations and interactive websites? Yeah definitely a nice improvement over WebGL 2, if years late.

WebGPU is pretty far behind what AAA games are using even as of 6 years ago. There's extra overhead and security in the WebGPU spec that AAA games do not want. Browsers do not lend themselves to downloading 300gb of assets.

Additionally, indie devs aren't using Steam for the technical capabilities. It's purely about marketshare. Video games are a highly saturated market. The users are all on Steam, getting their recommendations from Steam, and buying games in Steam sales. Hence all the indie developers publish to Steam. I don't see a web browser being appealing as a platform, because there's no way for developers to advertise to users.

That's also only indie games. AAA games use their own launchers, because they don't _need_ the discoverability from being on Steam. So they don't, and avoid the fees. If anything users _want_ the Steam monopoly, because they like the platform, and hate the walled garden launchers from AAA companies.

(I work on high end rendering features for the Bevy game engine https://bevyengine.org, and have extensive experience with WebGPU)

I was working through an example in the repo for the Bevy game engine recently and came across this code

That's possible. I did spend quite a bit of time tinkering with compiler flags, and followed the recommendations.

Some notes I found just now seems to agree with my results, though: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/3978#issuecomment-...

I cannot recommend immediate mode GUI programming based on the limitations I've experienced working with egui.

egui does not support putting two widgets in the center of the screen: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/3211

It's really easy to get started with immediate mode, it's really easy to bust out some UI, but the second you start trying to involve dynamically resized context and responsive layouts -- abandon all hope. The fact it has to calculate everything in a single pass makes these things hard/impossible.

... that said, I'm still using it for https://ant.care/ (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants) because it's the best thing I've found. I'm crossing my fingers that Bevy's UI story (or Kayak https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui) become significantly more fleshed out sooner rather than later. Bevy 0.13 should have lots more in this area though (https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/9538)

I've also been enjoying building My First Game™ in Bevy using ECS. The community around Bevy really shines, but Flecs (https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs) is arguably a more mature, open-source ECS implementation. You don't get to write in Rust, though, which makes it less cool in my book :)

I'm not very proud of the code I've written because I've found writing a game to be much more confusing than building websites + backends, but, as the author notes, it certainly feels more elegant than OOP or globals given the context.

I'm building for WASM and Bevy's parallelism isn't supported in that context (yet? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/4078), so the performance wins are just so-so. Sharing a thread with UI rendering suuucks.

If anyone wants to browse some code or ask questions, feel free! https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

These days, some game engines have done pretty well at making compute shaders easy to use (such as Bevy [1] -- disclaimer, I contribute to that engine). But telling the scientific/financial/etc. community that they need to run their code inside a game engine to get a decent experience is a hard sell. It's not a great situation compared to how easy it is on NVIDIA's stack.

[1]: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/examples/shader...

This is the API you need: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/9774