taoup VS upb

The car runs on perl and a PIC MCU.

In #devops is turtle all way down but at bottom is perl script. - @devops_borat

... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

This has been recognized for a long time.

Those change-over things are really severe. Really severe problems. - Joseph Henry Condon, Bell Labs ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

However, we have much better tools now, such as high availability clustering, distributed architectures, middleware proxies, protocol-level support for temporary failures and retries, mature caching systems and fault tolerant hardware and software infrastructure. So it's practically not as hard as it once was, because if you've got your ducks in a row you can use a proven method or get fallbacks for free.

Between Plan 9 and Erlang we missed a bus somewhere.

Love it. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

That's your second pithy wisdom tidbit. (The first was The idea that data is a corporate asset needs to die. Data is a corporate liability.)

To make error is human. To propagate error to all server in automatic way is #devops. - @devops_borat

... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

In a sense, we have the printing press, but people are still illiterate.

Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

How about China?

IMHO the problem here in China is the politicization of education and media which denies individual ideas and experience from the earliest years, illogically burdening children with unnavigable quantities of take-home homework and suffocating the analytical thought and independent curiosity that are so critical for research and development. It is as if no research in to pedagogy occurred since the 1920s, and individuals still belong to a numbered local production collective, except that now it is titled a "Number X Middle School". They literally give out little flags to children as young as pre-school, it's full on nationalism every day here.

If you like snippets in text consider the unix fortune tradition, I maintain https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup which produces bitesized memes in glorious ANSI color. Some startuppy, mostly software architecture/design focus, some more broad anthropology/history. Aim is a high signal to noise ratio and consistently inspirational/curveball thinking.

Business doesn't welcome competition or oversight.

Competition is for losers - Peter Thiel (2014 speech at Harvard) ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

Rights have to be regulated in to existence or actively fought for. These days the populace is so zoned out on Tiktok and home delivery the chances of a popular movement are precisely zero unless toward a new TV serial.

> There are undeniably power users for whom every last bit of performance translates to very large sums of money, and I don’t claim to know how to satisfy them otherwise.

That is the key, right there.

In 1970, C may have been considered a general-purpose programming langauge. Today, given the landscape of languages currently available, C and C++ have a much more niche role. They are appropriate for the "power users" described above, who need every last bit of performance, at the cost of more development effort.

When I'm working in C, I'm frequently watching the assembly language output closely, making sure that I'm getting the optimizations I expect. I frequently find missed optimization bugs in compilers. In these scenarios, undefined behavior is a tool that can actually help achieve my goal. The question I'm always asking myself is: what do I have to write in C to get the assembly language output I expect? Here is an example of such a journey: https://blog.reverberate.org/2021/04/21/musttail-efficient-i...

I created the https://github.com/protocolbuffers/upb project a long time ago. It's written in C, and over the years I have gotten it to a state where the speed and code size are pretty compelling. Both speed and code size are very important to the use cases where it is being used. It's a relatively small code base also. I think focused, performance-oriented kernels are the area where C makes the most sense.

More and more languages are being built on top of the "upb" C library for protobuf (https://github.com/protocolbuffers/upb) which is designed around arenas to avoid this very problem.

Currently Ruby, PHP, and Python are backed by upb, but this list may expand in the future.

Lua uses "chained scatter" (linked list, but links point to other entries in the same table, to maintain locality): https://github.com/lua/lua/blob/master/ltable.c

This is a good visual depiction of chained scatter: https://book.huihoo.com/data-structures-and-algorithms-with-...

Inspired by Lua, I did the same for upb (https://github.com/protocolbuffers/upb). I recently benchmarked upb's table vs SwissTable for a string-keyed table and found I was beating it in both insert and lookup (in insert upb is beating SwissTable by 2x).

> But yes, the serialized dict-of-arrays-of-dicts type stuff can be approached in a few ways, none of which are particularly beautiful.

For what it's worth, this sounds somewhat similar to protobuf (which also supports dicts, arrays, etc).

After spending many years trying to figure out the smallest, fastest, and simplest way to implement protobuf in https://github.com/protocolbuffers/upb, the single best improvement I found was to make the entire memory management model arena-based.

When you parse an incoming request, all the little objects (messages, arrays, maps, etc) are allocated on the arena. When you are done with it, you just free the arena.

In my experience this results in code that is both simpler and faster than trying to memory-manage all of the sub-objects independently. It also integrates nicely with existing memory-management schemes: I've been able to adapt the arena model to both Ruby (tracing GC) and PHP (refcounting) runtimes. You just have to make sure that the arena itself outlives any reference to any of the objects within.

> Google's implementations, at least C++ and Java, are a bunch of bloated crap (or maybe they're very good, but for a use case that I haven't yet encountered).

As someone who has been working on protobuf-related things for >10 years, including creating a size-focused implementation (https://github.com/protocolbuffers/upb), and has been working on the protobuf team for >5 years, I have a few thoughts on this.

I think it is true that protobuf C++ could be a lot more lean than it currently is. That's why I created upb (above) to begin with. But there's also a bit more to this story.

The protobuf core runtime is split into two parts, "lite" and "full". Basically the full runtime contains reflection support, while the lite runtime omits it. The full runtime is much larger than the lite runtime. If you don't need runtime reflection for your protos, it's better to use "lite" by using "option optimize_for = LITE_RUNTIME" in your .proto file (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto#op...). That will cut out a huge amount of overhead in your binary. On the downside, you won't get functionality that requires reflection, including text format, JSON, or DebugString().

In addition to this, even the lite runtime can get "lighter" if you compile your binary to statically link the runtime and strip unused symbols with -ffunction-sections/-fdata-sections and gc-sections in the linker. Some parts of the lite runtime are only used in unusual situations, like ExtensionSet which is only used if your protos use proto2 extensions (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto#ex...). If you avoid this stuff, the lite runtime is quite light.

However, there is also the issue of the generated code size. The size of the generated code is generally quite large, even for lite. You are getting a generated parser, serializer, CopyFrom(), MergeFrom(), etc for every message you define. If your schema is of any size, this quickly adds up and can dwarf the size of the actual runtime. For this reason, C++ also supports "option optimize_for = CODE_SIZE" which does everything reflectively instead of generating code. This means you pay the fixed size hit from the full runtime, but the generated code size is much smaller. On the downside, "optimize_for = CODE_SIZE" has a severe speed penalty.

I have long had the goal of making https://github.com/protocolbuffers/upb competitive with protobuf C++ in speed while achieving much smaller code size. With the benefit of 10 years of hindsight and many wrong turns, upb is meeting and even surpassing these goals. It is an order of magnitude smaller, both in the core runtime and the generated code, and after some recent experiments it is beginning to significantly surpass it in speed also (I want to publish these results soon, but the code is on this branch: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/upb/pull/310).

upb has downsides that prevent it from being fully "user ready" yet: the API is still not 100% stable, there is no C++ API for the generated code yet (and C APIs for protobuf are relatively verbose and painful), it has a bunch of legacy APIs sitting around that I am just on the verge of being able to finally delete, and it doesn't support proto2 extensions yet. On the upside, it is 100% conformant on every other protobuf feature, it has full binary and JSON support, it supports reflection if you want it but also lets you omit it for code size savings.

I hope 2021 is a year when I'll be able to publish more about these results, and when upb will be a more viable choice for users who want a smaller protobuf implementation.