Rust & C++ code is here: gist.github.com/fasterthanlime/b2e261c3d1492171d6a46edf620a0728 If someone's watching this going "I /know/ I can beat that by tweaking the C++ code", you should do it! I think there's a lot of good that can happen with some friendly competition between the C++ and Rust camps, as long as we both treat it from a "huh, neat that we can get compilers to do that!" perspective and not just shout at each other from opposite side of a virtual stadium. I'll try to make a full write-up that goes a little deeper (maybe comparing emitted IR between clang and rustc), but first I have more research to do.
Definitely need to get someone who knows relatively-modern C++ to refactor this more idiomatically (might even try it myself). So many macros and C-style code. And immediately de-referencing begin() is not undefined behaviour, it’s programmer error - the programme did exactly what it was told it to do.
@@decky1990 i dont consider anyone who write using namespace std; as a C++ programmer, because if they had access to any decent C++ teaching materials they would have known using namespace std; is REALLY REALLY lame. if they have heard they shouldn't use using namespace std; and keep using it then they aren't seriously enough and treating C++ as a toy language that for lame competitions. is this gate keeping, yes, but is is it unreasonable to expect this, no. Maybe because there are so many bad youtube shorts, tiktok videos about C++ out there is become a norm. I couldn't believe that @fasterthanlime think this is how people write C++ and use this kind of code to compare with Rust (5:00 section).
There's also a lot of unecessary by value copying on the C++ implementation. Quick examples I've noticed is in the for-each loop and when populating an object then passing it to a push_back() of a vector. Though I'm not sure how much of that impacts performance. There's performance left on the table from using cout and endl since the implementation of those two are notorious for slow IO without some configuring.
@@tsunekakou1275 aye the namespace directive is a bit of a faux pas. I’ve heard stroustrup kills a kitten every time some uses it. I suppose this was my cry for more idiomatic writing. I don’t want to beat the guy up for posting interesting content, but maybe get someone who specialises in the language instead of Jack-of-all-trading them, such that they’re all average implementations. Would be a really interesting comparison.
As soon as I saw the C++ solution I knew that it wasn't written by someone who knows C++ all that well so I decided to attempt my own solution. My solution ended up being around 4000x faster. C++ and Rust are close enough that the deciding factor for any non-trivial task is almost always going to be the algorithms used, not the language. So study your algorithms, folks. :P
@@arthurpenndragon6434Once you get used to looking at the disassembly, it's pretty easy to make 3 order improvements consistently, on other people's software anyway...
Fair. What you are is a specialist. The acreage cpp programmer wouldn't go into your level of detail .. but I must ask, are you still using cpp if you are optimising the compiler?
I know **just** enough low level computer magic to understand this, but man was it work. This was very well presented, I've seen much simpler things explained with far less clarity.
This is perhaps the best compliment I've received all year. I know the year is young, but still! I'm really happy that the video is understandable at some level - it's really hard to strike a good balance between "obvious to a lot of regulars" and "desperately impenetrable".
@@fasterthanlimea big part is your delivery takes you through the emotional journey(like saying “let’s not talk about that, and hopefully never again”, about an especially complicated topic) which makes it a lot more engaging than other comparatively similar videos.
@@spoofilybeloved6729 absolutely, their approach is much more like a teacher who wants to ensure you can follow along and feel included. A lot of presenters will pride themselves on knowing something and make you feel small for not understanding.
I failed to understand SIMD section, but i understood general principle and difference between 2 cases. It means that you explanation is really great. And i’m not even a developer or a programmer.
Love the video! Absolute madness at the end, LLVM is probably such mess at this point because of the optimization priorities that it takes a team of compiler engineers a couple of days to even trace a problem lol, but they are the real heroes
The Static Single Assignment (SSA) form that LLVM IR uses simplifies dataflow dramatically. In Rust, it's a bit more SSA like due to borrow checker rules limiting aliasing, while C++ aliases at will, which can cause some optimizers to be disabled since the dataflow (and if it could have changed) is un provable at compile time.
Maybe you doubt, that I - not a rust expert -can write code slower than c++ one? I can, trust me. Another question is proficiency level of the one who wrote these C++ solutions that were ported.
This video is really great! I also did Advent of Code with Rust and it really helped. It's really refreshing to listen about Assembly in a clear, non-scary way.
I'm glad you felt that way! As I rewatched along during the premiere, I was convinced everyone would drop off as soon as the assembly section started, but maybe it's because I've heard those sections a hundred times while editing already!
I do think it’s interesting the difference in knowledge of the two languages and what is “easier”. I know C++ very well I would say and I’ve never even touched rust, but when he went over the operator overload functions and mentioned how C++ was difficult and rust was “just implementing a trait like any other”. This made me audibly laugh since for me C++ overload is super easy and clean, when I saw the rust code at 5:56 it looked insanely bloated and had characters that seemed absolutely useless. I’m not trying to bash Rust or the knowledge Faster, just pointing out how coding in a language with little knowledge creates MASSIVE bias and situations like this where something is “simple” just because you know it.
I completely agree with what you're saying, but I think the point he was getting at is the Rust way is a typical trait implementation. I think he meant that if you know even a minimal amount of Rust then you're going to know how to use traits whereas operator overloading is extra knowledge in C++. Also, he did simplify it down to simply writing #[derive(PartialOrd)] right after :P
@@RottenFishbone i wouldn't say "overloading is extra knowledge in C++", it's not template level difficulty, you can learn overloading after a week or two. sure overloading has a lot of thing going on there but at least it in your face instead hiding. you could argue Rust PartialOrd is newbie friendly but i kinda disagree with that even.
I spent weeks of my life shoving SIMD into an unreal engine module to leverage new cpu architectures and you managed to sum up basically 3 weeks of pain into 20 minutes and I still understood it better than all the formal sources I bled my eyes at. Compiler engineers deserve all of the love in the world and they are criminally under appreciated.
Just a note, if you're using the same "backend" eg: llvm for rust and c++ the results should be similar, the reality is though while llvm is a generalized backend for multiple languages, it's history is primarily to support the clang frontend. Essentially you're comparing how well integrated one frontend is with another so don't be too surprised if rust falls behind c++. The add_examples issue is due in part to padding. Your struct with 3 members is likely being handed off to the compiler and it sees a struct which isn't perfectly aligned to a power of 2. So while you're thinking you're dealing with 3 64 bit registers the compiler's going to treat that struct as 4 64 bit registers. While you're right that you're just adding 6 64 bit integers together, what you've likely done is trip up an optimization stage because the compiler sees 8 64 bit integers (where the 4th and 8th are essentially discarded) and that likely is enough for simd optimizations to kick in (where adding 6 may not be worth doing) and then confuse later optimization stages.
How is this llvm's and not rusts' fault? The only stable backend for Rust is LLVM. It was their(rust creators) decision to use LLVM. They could've written their own backend(which would've been a disaster) but they didn't. I think it's completely fair to compare Rust and C performance by how well they work with LLVM
@@igorordecha I get your point but I disagree. It could easily happen that a future release of clang or gcc outperforms rust just by tweaking how it interacts with compiler. Or someone could write a transpiler from c++ to rust and then compile code that way. I have to say that i don't agree that any this video does not demonstrate that one language is superior or inferior to the other.
@@mvuksano rust might be better language (and it is) as far as the spec and syntax go BUT with current tooling it IS slower* than C. It doesn't have to be that way in the future but it is slower* now. And that is what this video shows. It isn't "not fair comparison" because at the end of the day the binary built with rust is worse*. Yes, it's not the Rust's fault. It's the tooling's fault but it directly make the language worse (for now) * yes, as shown in this video, you can make the binary faster by tweaking the number of arguments but in the real world you're not changing the API because the compiler has a bug.
This point (and all its replies) is very good - as is the whole video and many more of the reply comments. I'm just about to embark on learning Rust (and Go at the same time), and although this is definitely not my first computer language rodeo (I used to be somewhat of a collector (some might say hoarder) of computer languages, but the number of languages available has now gotten somewhat ahead of my rate of collecting them), I'm glad I saw this video first. What I've learned here, is that if you want to write performant Rust code (on X86 target CPU, say), you're gonna have to learn how to outsmart the combination of the Rust compiler plus LLVM plus all the cumulative stupidities of the 50-year process of patching the X86 instruction architecture plus especially the well-motivated but often badly implemented SIMD instructions. One problem is that the code generation process does not have sufficient knowledge of the approximate relative performance of various instructional/architectural approaches to ASM-coding the given Rust code. If it did, it could at least loop over the several aproaches and reject using those SIMD instructions when the extra wasted execution time makes it such that using SIMD slow down the execution. There probably needs to be finer gained compiler control over its use of SIMD (not sure what's available at this point). You don't want to tell it not to use SIMD at all, just to un-screw-up its compilation a function for X = Y + Z, when later in the code you have a whole huge section that definitely needs the SIMD instructions. Also, it's clear to me that (assuming I'm targeting X86 again, for sake of argument) I'm gonna have to learn the ugly X86 instruction set in order to do performance tuning in Rust. Darn, I thought I could just use Rust, but at the same time not only avoid the inanities of C++, but also say to the option of "learn X86 ASM" been-there-done-that-earlier-in-my-career with a much better computer architecture so really don't want to go down that road again only this time with a horrible X86 instruction-set architecture. One wonders whether, in spite of the fact that Rust is not an interpreted language and thus does not require a formal byte-code intermediate language technically speaking, it might not be a great idea to define a (better than Java and perfectly defined for a hypothetical Rust virtual machine that matches well against current X86 and Arm architectures) Rust byte-code architecture, and then compile Rust to that Rust VM, then send that on to LLVM for final compilation to target machine. You could maybe make that first to-byte-code translation smarter, say smart enough that the Rust coder doesn't have to stand on his/her head just to outsmart the current combo of Rust + LLVM.
Just glancing over the C++ code it could definitely be improved by: Removing the globals Removing the horrific macros (for endl specifically) The constants could be made into constexpr constants (i.e real constants, not text replacement) Removing the using namespace std Removing the `typedef` struct (this has never been a required thing in C++, this is pure C) Replacing the remaining typedefs with using Adding defaulted comparison operators for the structs that would essentially all be one liners without any user defined bodies (structs are just classes, they can have member functions, even though the operators would be friended and not technically members). Not much about performance itself which could probably also be improved, just cleaning up the code immensely by following the c++ core guidelines.
Yeah I mentioned in the Day 18 write-up that these solutions felt a lot like "C/C++", not "proper C++", but like you said I don't think any of these actually would impact performance. I would really hate if the original author would get negative feedback from all that though 😬 Thanks for the C++ refresher!
@@Wunkolo Yeah when doing a for each the code should be doing it by reference, i:e: for ( BluePrint& bp : bps ) { The copies are certainly making it slower.
i'm a C++ programmer, but these thing "C++ would have been fixed if thet remove preprocessor, Removing the globals, The constants could be made into constexpr constants Removing the typedef struct, Replacing the remaining typedefs with using" C++ can't remove this features... cuz if they did, it will destroy the backward compatibility with C & the past version. so yeah, it can improve C++... but they can't remove this features, and it will never for a long time. and if u wanna write a faster and a good code... then just don't use these features u mentioned them.
"If you see a compiler engineer in the wild, ask if they need a hug." 😂 Very interesting to see the differences in compilation between C++ and Rust, and the effects of Stack vs register allocation illustrated so well. Great video, tons of information packed in a very short space. Thank you.
Matt Godbolt has a podcast (two's complement), and on the latest episode he quoted 'the first rule of profiling is that you're wrong' by which he means (I'm assuming) it is virtually impossible to guess the performance of a piece of code, or know which version will be faster as you illustrated here nicely. So I'm guessing the answer to the question in the title is 'it depends' or just 'they are similar'
Like most titles in the form of a question, that one's not really meant to be answered - but I agree, they both performed pretty close to each other (and I still want to have a C++ person look at it - which I'm hoping this video will achieve). Being wrong is something I'm trying to get better at, since every time you're wrong is an opportunity to learn something, and I love to learn. Here my first two go-to tools (callgrind & not-perf) revealed themselves to be not so useful and I was forced to stare at assembly for a long while, which I think is a happy outcome for everyone!
The title is very clickbaity of course. It doesn't make sense to compare languages for performance; rather, we compare compilers' codegen, which is what the video demonstrates.
@@AdvancedSoul well, you can compare programming language features by performance, because some can be implemented faster than others. Rust and C++ are basically the same in this regard though. With a theoretical advantage for Rust because it often knows more about borrowing, but that is currently not exploited by the LLVM backend. So yeah between Rust and C++ it comes down to what the compiler does and if you use LLVM for C++ it will come done to some very random implementation details.
Well, that escalated quickly. Came for Rust, got to Assembler. I wish I learned this in the university, it is so fascinating. Makes me think how many decisions were taken for us in higher level languages. Thank you for the deep dive and clear explanation. I feel complete… Turing complete now 😅
Great video. I love the low-level stuff, and compiler writers definitely deserve many hugs. I have my own toy compiler written in Rust, and even implementing the dumbest register allocator possible was already worth at least two hugs per day, because debugging even the tiniest of changes means reading screens of assembly code, interpreting that in your head and trying to keep up with tons of info, such as which variable should sit in which register, what registers are spilled at a particular point, etc. That's hard even given that I "cheated" and decided to generate code for RISC-V, which is much simpler than x86 or amd64, and I'm just playing around. I don't know if I am even able to write a more sophisticated one correctly with my ADHD and average intellectual abilities. How hard is what serious compiler devs do? Probably insanely hard. The good thing is I have a cat too (btw she has the same pattern on her forehead as your cat). Whenever I feel overwhelmed with coding, she's always there for me. By that I mean she is sleeping nearby, not caring even a little bit about my struggle with my own inability to think clearly. But occasionally, she jumps on my lap and gently reminds me of things more important than code, such as scratching her cheeks 😁
The content was really great, super informative. It was like reading one of your blog posts but in video form. I watched the day 18 stream and learned a ton. Some of the assembly stuff went over my head but that's just because I'm not too familiar with it. But even so, it was explained well. I'll definitely be coming back to watch it again once I know more about assembly.
5:05 Replacing whatever C++ map you were using with absl::flat_hash_map or some other high performance map implementation would probably have significantly improved the C++ performance. But you're right you need a certain level of experience in C++ to know that the standard library map types are kind of shit for performance. 5:50 In C++20 you can just do `auto operator(const Cube&, const Cube&) = default` and the compiler will automatically implement a lexicographic comparator, like the Rust derived comparator. While this is a fairly recent feature, I would consider it something every C++ programmer should know, just like every Rust programmer should know about derive, because it is so useful. On one final note, having recently been comparing some C++ and Rust code for performance, I'll say that one Rust feature that can often give it an advantage over C++ is destructive moves, which allow the Rust compiler to make some good optimizations when passing objects by move that would not be possible in C++.
"I felt pretty stupid while reading it, and I wish you the exact same- that just means you found something you can learn about." 2:57 That's a great way of putting it, and it makes me a lot more comfortable learning that I'm not the only "stupid" one when it comes to working with and learning to code. Thanks for that!
There's still more layers of complexity. Code speed differs depending on whether the instructions/data hit the on-chip cache which in turn depends on the level and size of the cache. Also, optimal alignment of data can make an utterly huge speed difference (address boundary of 8 vs 16 vs 32 vs 64 vs 128). Ultimately, all these factors will be optimized by compiler backends which have been trained by machine learning. I'm an old compiler guy who is spending his retirement on doing just this. I'm betting we can dump LLVM for a machine-instruction-machine-learning-neural-network.
That is true (and way beyond the scope of this video). I remember seeing some stuff re: machine-learning driven register allocation in LLVM, but I have no idea if it's actually mainstream enough to, say, be used by default in rustc. Do you happen to know? I'm curious!
Turn compilers into an even bigger black box! It would be scary if a malicious AI corrupted compilers so that all programs would contain silently executing code to do...something.
I believe the reason that 3×u64x2 uses registers where 2×u64x3 uses stack is as simple as the Rust ABI having a ScalarPair mode to pass scalar pairs (like slice references, or other structs which are just two ints) as two separate arguments. So before LLVM sees it, the function taking 3×u64x2 gets turned into a function taking 6×u64. The 2×u64x3 is given to LLVM as a function taking two pointers. IIRC LLVM does actually have the ability to pass more complex types than just scalars in function arguments (i.e. virtual registers), but rustc never uses this functionality because the semantics of compound types in LLVM don't line up well with Rust's semantics.
Interesting! Can you expand on "the semantics of compound types in LLVM don't line up well with Rust's semantics"? Preferably in blog post form, 2 pages minimum, no maximum, you have 4 hours ago, ready set go (just kidding, but I would love to read more about this if you feel like posting a link to something!)
@@fasterthanlime for simple and "full" types like u64x3 here, I don't think there's any difference. I honestly know very little, just that rustc only uses LLVM's compound types for field offset indexing and lowers padding to explicit fields. I also think compound types in LLVM may also carry TBAA implications, though that wouldn't matter if only used for passing compound types as function arguments. The TL;DR version is quite literally just that doing pass-by-reference for all compound types is simple, sufficient, obviously correct, and doesn't impede inlining optimization.
This is the first video I have seen from you, and I have to say, it made me sure I want to see more from this channel. Such well present, such cat, such content. You have a really nice style, keep it up.
Thanks!! I'm glad I'm finally able to release videos on par with my posts, there was a big gap for a while and the audiences for both didn't intersect much.
ปีที่แล้ว +12
For the C++ version, I'd suggest making the operator functions static and turning bps into a local variable in main.
"What's faster? C++ or Rust? Trick question! It's x86 Assembly! get ready to get comfortable with some goddamn registers!" on a lighter note WHY IS SIMD SUCH A BLACK BOX
Incredible video. I am going to share it with everyone in the company I run! Keep up the ultra-nerdy-geeky subjects & explanations, you are REALLY good at it and makes this kind of high level stuff very accessible to whoever is listening.
Extremely high-quality explanation, I'll make sure to send this to whoever wants an introduction to the world of assembly and the wild west of compiler optimizations!
if both use llvm as backend, they are similar, if c++ use gcc instead llvm then they can different, but rust can use gcc too, so they are similar. now take a look to the feature, rust give more feature and its design is 100% memory safe, preventing memory leaks that can happen in c++ when building big project with many people that they may forget to delete a variabel after unused.
5:50 operator overloading is quite simple, the OP just had no idea how to do it. And the spaceship operator in C++20 helps immensely in comparisons. It's basically the same as your cmp function.
How did it take the algorithm this long to show me your videos. I've read all your articles as I see them show up on Reddit. Happy to see your videos are just as interesting.
The thing about C++ is that it is very easy to make suboptimal choices in writing the code. A person doing C++ for 10 years is nowhere near an expert but even then you could easily make a single mistake and have your code run 2000x slower than it needs to be. But the good thing about C++ is: if you’re allowed to make “non-faithful” changes to code, you could theoretically turn your problem into an exercise to be done by the compiler and at run time it does the minimum amount of work. Potentially have the answer of the question be a value literal. C++ will always be in a weird place where it has to maintain some weird compatibility with C, which allows it to piggyback off of the work of really smart people that work on C, but also inadvertently carrying all the baggage and weird crap from C. Rust fortunately doesn’t have this problem because it was designed from the ground up pretty recently.
Die-hard C++ developer here. I've been thinking for a long time that I should give Rust a try. Some really cool concepts, fast and very expressive. To be fair C++ has been progressing a lot in the last years and people are usually complaining about ancient C++03 while they should be using C++17 or 20 by now...
I actually used pshufd to move half cat parts to both halves of an XMM register. Beware: if you get the `order` operand wrong, things get weird. Real weird.
I love the way you explain function calls and argument passing, it's like a crash course of what the compiler does in "higher level" languages, explained to an audience of 50 year old 6502 programmers hahaha! Really a great way to go about it IMO, well explained but not dumbed down ELI5 style :-)
One thing to add: if you use registers of SIMD instructions, the program takes more time to resume during kernel’s context switching because we need to save/load data for extra registers. That is one of the reasons why utilizing extra registers (like -march=native) results in slower code.
Most of the C++ optimization happens in the flags when you are compiling, and as you said you had trouble even in linking. So, I could say somebody who's experienced in C++ can definitly beat RUST. Moreover, guys please don't get into this nonesense comparisons, depending on your application you should choose the language.
This is an absolutely fantastic video! Loved the way you described SIMD instructions! Respect! 🙌🙌🙌🙌 I wish to see an x86 programming tutorial course from you!
To include binary data into c++ on Linux, creat the binary file and use LD with the right input file type flag to generate a .o file, that object file will have two symbols for the start and end of the data which you can access by declaring the right arrays with the right names (no length values required) something like unsigned char symbol_start[]; where you replace "symbol" according to the symbols name.
“It’s been an ongoing fight, according to sources who are very tired.” Literally almost spit out my drink. That is some quality wit, characteristic of this whole, excellent video.
I think that it's important to consider the development time of the application, when talking about speed. Which is why Javascript is so popular, despite being slower than C++. Rust seems to be an amazing middle ground with speeds that compete with well written C++ code! Thanks for the video.
@@fasterthanlime I used to write some small scale programs in Go 2-3 years ago, switched to Rust since. Can you elaborate how Go programs grow unmaintainable that‘s specific to the language? I am just curious.
The short answer: it doesn't really matter. These types of micro-optimizations are only relevant for very, very specific use cases. People are writing production code in Java, Python, hell even JavaScript. Sometimes the C++ compiler will generate better code and sometimes Rust. I would say C++ has a slight advantage because of how long it's been out there but on the other side Rust can potentially surpass it because of how explicit it is: the compiler has just more information and safety guarantees and can thus find more shortcuts.
I'd open an issue on that or reach out to one of the core devs. That seems like an oversight from the compiler team. Has to be some issue with the IR code that's generated not playing nice with LLVM
So a friend of mine who's a rustc contributor looked into it some. This is the closest report I could find: github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/26494#issuecomment-619506345 - according to them, it's an extremely common report with no easy solution, most PRs to "fix it" introduce regressions 🙃
@@fasterthanlime solving this seems like it is related to the bin packing problem only a little bit more complicated because of things like alignment requirements.
Rust expert/C++ novice puts in a lot of effort to make Rust implementations faster than naive C++ implementations. Finds that those Rust implementations are sometimes faster.
was very impressed with how knowledgeable you seemed and thought to myself why I hadn't seen you before but then I saw the channel name and everything clicked haha
C++ leaves certain behaviors undefined because it allows the compiler more freedom and tricks for optimization. Rust being a bit more strict for "safety", can in some cases constrict what contortions the compiler is allowed to do.
Although that's true, 1) I don't believe there's any actual UB here, at least not any that lets the compiler optimize more, 2) it goes the other way too! See news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25624538 (afaik noalias has been enabled for a few stable versions - until another bug is found, it's had a comical track record)
That “.begin()” thing -- you have to compare it to “.end()” first, and it’s only safe to dereference if they are not equal. I know very little C++, but I do remember that.
For what it's worth, in C++20 you no longer need to implement comparison operators if they're doing normal lexical comparison: auto operator (const Type&) const = default;
Thanks for the great video! I'd like to see how some more complicated language features (such as fat pointer/vtable, or enum vs tagged union) may affect the compiling result and the performance
That would be interesting! My guess is that, like here, they're fairly close. One area where I think we'd see a real difference is noalias, but I need to figure out how to showcase it.
Modern complied languages should be reasonably comparable in performance, and in any case compiler writers will leap frog each other as they improve compilers. I program in C++ even though it's the most hacked up language ever. At one point I considered going to Rust, but the first thing I needed was placement new, which the Rust guys told me it didn't have. In addition I got advised to redesign my code if I can't directly port it from C++ to Rust. At that point I gave up. In general I find these days the way your data is organized is far more important than the the kind of stuff your talking about here and C++ lets you do close to anything in that department. But again it's an annoying hacked up language and it's getting more hacked up each year.
Just do C-style C++ and ignore everything in the standard Library and thats it, no stupidly hacked code unreadable templates and OOP nonsense. If you care about performance and you are already thinking in terms of data layout you are probably already doing this, but just in case I had to say it. Also you could consider using one of the new C replacement languages like Odin, I've heard they are really nice, Rust is indeed a stupid language to use if you don't care about hardcore Security, the kind of restrictions Rust imposes on you are pointless in that case.
if both use llvm as backend, they are similar, if c++ use gcc instead llvm then they can different, but rust can use gcc too, so they are similar. now take a look to the feature, rust give more feature and its design is 100% memory safe, preventing memory leaks that can happen in c++ when building big project with many people that they may forget to delete a variabel after unused.
And when you need to write something lowlevel,you Should use unsafe modificator or how ir called in that piece of crap. And like candy. Uou can usr leaks or valgrind,which give you full info about memory leaks. Fact that you fidn't know about it, tell everyone level of understanding of this topic .
I have encountered assembly briefly from looking at some disassembly projects in the video game preservation community. Anything that helps me understand what is going on with assembly in practical and easy-for-newcomers terms is really fascinating and helpful to me. Want to know what those Game Boy Color games were doing under the hood! Thanks for this video, seems really impartial but also very human. Just what I like to see in the tech space. Heart > factionalism! Neutral reviews of the tech can both serve as documentation *and* impetus for those who are closer to the tech to maybe improve the state of the art based on really having the problem laid out in front of them. Takes you out of the fog and makes you go "hmm, yeah, maybe that thing right there".
I have a few other good ones, but be warned that as you go back in time, you'll see myself get worse and worse at script writing, performing, shooting, and editing. Thanks for the kind words!
@@fasterthanlime This format really with fluid and beautiful code presentation while diving deep into interesting concepts of computing is surely the best match for my tastes, but I still really enjoyed some of your other videos and they are all really good so.. thank you for your hard work!
Decent video. Obviously, everything done in one language can be done in the other one as well. When it comes to optimizing stuff like this, it's mostly "luck" as to which language's libraries are more suited for the job at hand. I don't think "which is faster" could ever be an actual question. There's many other far better questions: "which is safer?", "which is easier to learn?", "which one allows for better expressiveness?", "which one is the better option for embedded?", and so on.
We're roughly in agreement but let me pick two nits: there's definitely things you can do in C++ that you can't do in safe Rust, simply because the borrow checker doesn't understand them. And I say that as a pretty vocal Rust advocate but that's just... the deal we made with the compiler. (And there's still research/improvements ongoing, but, yeah.) Re safety/learning curve/expressiveness: I covered that /briefly/ when comparing the two codebases, but it probably warrants more in-depth coverage. I would of course need to do a bunch more research about C++ first. This is all the aftermath of some casual stream and I thought it could be an interesting watch for folks who are like "I hear Rust is safe and that sounds good but that also means it _has_ to be slower, right?". Thanks for watching!
@@fasterthanlime On the other hand, I find there are many things that you can do in safe Rust that you can't do in C++, not because of limits in the language but because of limits on your own sanity
@@squelchedotter That's very true but it's also a harder sell for folks who aren't /already/ into Rust. I sound like a madman writing "it's great, just try it" all year round: to most it just sounds like I'm in a cult, and that explains a lot about the dynamics of the interactions between the Rust community & the greater programming community.
there is no "better" questions. depends on what the project requirements or what resources on hands. i don't need safety so i don't need Rust. Rust is just as hard as C++, so there is no win there for both of them, "which one allows for better expressiveness?", expressiveness is not on the top of my list, i write my C++ quite expressive and i happy with that level of "expressiveness" for my projects, Rust abuse abbreviation is a minus for me (get a C vibe), what is Box, what is Rc (yes i know it RefCount), Arc (yes i know it Atomic RefCount). "which one is the better option for embedded?" no idea, mostly don't care. which is faster, they are similar or at least not the performance win margin that i would care. which compile faster? likely Rust would lose on that, i have never seen a benchmark that Rust won on compile time. which is more restrictive? Rust is more restrictive, for me it a lose, for others it might be a win. IMO, there isn't a whole lot of reasons to switch from C++ to Rust beside safety, and that is still a stretch, things that need safety require a good spec, Rust spec is like "what am i?".
@@tsunekakou1275 That's what I was trying to point out. The question on speed is mostly subjective as is mostly any other question. If we were trying to compare the 2 languages, there are far more important things that play a role into choosing between rust and C++. I personally also do C++, people using rust probably got their thing too. Just hoping it's not because it's "faster" in this one picked out case.
Registers don't exist anymore in practice on out of order processors. The registers you SEE in x86 assembly are for humans to read, but the cpu does register renaming. So the boundry between register and stack is very obscure
That's not what register renaming results in. Registers still exist and are still very much different than the memory (stack or heap). What register renaming does is separate physical registers from the publicly available registers. This is completely unrelated to whether something is in a register or on the stack. Register renaming is also independent of out-of-order-execution. A cpu can have either or both or neither.
What luck! I know someone who has a website full of articles focused on learning Rust! (the Advent of Code 2022 series is a good start - there's probably enough content on fasterthanli.me that it's disorienting)
if both use llvm as backend, they are similar, if c++ use gcc instead llvm then they can different, but rust can use gcc too, so they are similar. now take a look to the feature, rust give more feature and its design is 100% memory safe, preventing memory leaks that can happen in c++ when building big project with many people that they may forget to delete a variabel after unused.
@@fasterthanlime But you clarifying it as "the function calling the other function" clears up any potential confusion it could've caused, so it's all good Also I wrote that comment before finishing the video, and I really didn't think I could love it even more. But that ending with "if you ever meet a compiler engineer in the wild, ask if they need a hug" and the sponsored by cat segment are fucking amazing
Great video, as usual! A bit disappointed that I can't use a discount code with cat, but the information more than makes up for it. Wanted to ask, could alignment have something to do with the compiler's choice of using SSE registers, or may that be just because the size is bigger than 16 bytes and the compiler just treats smaller structs as a special case? Though otoh smaller structs could also mean say [u8, u16, u8, u32, u32]...
I think it has more to do with the latter: heuristics based on the maximum argument size the compiler is willing to pass by registers. But I don't feel comfortable making these claims without doing a bunch more research. Re SIMD, note that the compiler is using movdqu, the unaligned version. I don't think there's any guarantees the struct will be 16-byte-aligned, but I may be talking out of my butt.
Nice breakdown. C++ can be used to write optimal code, there isn't a "faster language", excluding specific use cases like neural networks, for which special tools can often produce a better machine code than a regular compiler. Rust can be used for the same kind of optimal code writing in general, except for when one needs special tools and there isn't a Rust interface but there is a C++ one. Examples of such tools include Halide and GPU languages like CUDA.
Weeeeell in general I would agree with you, as in I'm always skeptical that the compiler would optimize things properly - but this one surprised me, and to me, is a proper bug. I might look into it some more - it's possible to compare clang and rustc generated IR, so troubleshooting is not as inaccessible as it would appear.
AS a 1 year later comment(the c++ syntax i will talk about was intrdouced in c++20 so it still would have worked) in c++ you can also automatically let the compiler implement operator, which also implements automatically all the classic comparison operators
I have not done x86 assembler since i was like 12yrs old, still remember that LEA is load effective adress and some opcodes in hexadecimal. Like nop is 90h, and ret is C3h
This video helped me understand SIMD a lot! Could you maybe make some sort of x86 explanation series, where you also explain some more SIMD instructions?
I recently started learning rust and so far I really like it. Coming from c++ there are a few things that made it hard initially, like type casting being non trivial. Say you have a trait with several implementations for that trait and a function that takes in a trait object, does some checking to figure out what the specific implementation of that trait object is and then call specific functions of that implementation. In c++ you can use dynamic_cast. In rust the only solution that I could come up with after some research was to implement an as_any function and than use ::downcast_ref::variablename.as_ref().as_any().unwrap(). Seems kind of hacky but it led me to an alternative using an enum Type that has specific implementations as fields of the enum variants. That way you can do the same thing without dynamic dispatch which is kind of awesome! So yes, rust makes some things really hard and annoying but it usually has a better alternative. The other thing I slightly miss is that function overloading isn't possible. I'd also like to see more flexible operator overloading, but otherwise I really like the language. The fact that moving is the default behavior is awesome. Variables are const by default - amazing. No more const std::vector& when passing a parameter.
You should honestly never use dynamic_cast in c++ haha static_cast should be the way to go when possible, and reinterpret_cast when you know what you are doing (and use dynamic_cast only in specific cases) C-style cast should be a big no-no as you do not know which cast will be performed (especially when using templates) const_cast should be avoided except for very specific usages (or when using C api) I am no rust developer, therefore I don't see why a move by default (instead of copy) is good (I usually hardly never need to move anything, I always either pass references or copy) Same goes for the const by default, as const keyword is a no-op in c++, I don't really see its benefits, could you explain them?
@@az-kalaak6215 yeah I know dynamic cast isn't optimal, but in the specific scenario of downcasting in a class hierarchy I think it's the better choice to use dynamic cast because you get a runtime check. But of course you need to check if the cast failed. Static cast is the more dangerous one in this case as it'll lead to undefined behavior at runtime if the object that you are down casting is actually different from the type T in static_cast. Anyway, the example I mentioned came up in testing code, so I wanted to make sure the derived type coming in was actually of the expected type and dynamic cast was the best choice to do that check. Regarding your question, I don't think it's an advantage for devs who know c++ very well, but the move by default forces you think harder about whether you want to use that object in the future or not. Moves are destructive in rust and the compiler prevents you from using a moved variable unless you reinitialize it with valid data. The fact that const is the default again forces you to think hard if a value needs to be mutable, a function needs to take a non-const reference, etc. These things help the compiler with optimization the generates code. Of course you could arrive at the same result using c++, but it would be the less concise and non-default option. So it's the one that is probably not always used when it really should be. That's more or less all I'm saying. Rust gives you defaults that help the compiler optimize code better, which makes it more likely sloppily written up rust code will outperform sloppily written c++ code. In a perfect world, there wouldn't be any sloppy code, but yeah, that's not realistic haha
@@az-kalaak6215 yeah more or less. And you can be certain that if you code compiles, it won't have any undefined behavior. Unless you use unsafe, but that's a whole different story.
The traps you kept running into that made the C version of the app faster are bound to be the same traps any new developer would run into as well. This is problematic for Rust. The other problem for Rust is that they are many more C experts and until there are more Rust experts, C will continue to be the fastest.
Nice stuff 😁 I remember manually optimizing vector functions in MPI using MMX and SSE commands when this was still the hot stuff and compilers had no clue about them. Putting in some prefectches here and there to optimize caching helped as well. That were fun times. 😍
just pointing out -- on the programming language benchmark game website, you have to scroll all the way down on the toy program page (n-body page for example) to find the unsafe solutions, where you will find even faster submissions. For example, at the time of writing this comment, the fastest is a C submission which is twice as fast.
Makes strong assumption about input data Writes poor C++ that completely ignores that assumption and invokes UB Conclusion: C++ bad Ugh... I see it a lot and it boils my blood every time. C++ is complex, not stupid. As to the struct and registers "weirdness". It's just alignment and padding, normal stuff. You can instruct your compiler to print struct memory layout to see what happens.
The C++ solution isn't mine, for the record. For Day 19 part 1 (the bulk of the video), the struct layout is exactly the same in both Rust and C++. I'm also not sure where in the video you've heard/seen such a conclusion. You seem to assume I'm hating on C++ /and/ stupid, which is unfortunate 🤷
@@fasterthanlime I'm not assuming anything about you, except maybe that you have good intentions. Sorry if it came across as an attack. "stupid" was about C++, not you, and the comment was about a tendency I see in many materials - writing poor C++ code and criticizing the language for it. The *begin() example you've shown (no matter who wrote it) fits that perfectly and so I made a frustrated remark. Comparing languages in general is interesting, but you really have to write good code in both first, otherwise it's like comparing two cars without tires to see which one goes faster. I see that a lot with wild conclusions and it just plays on my nerves, so I burst sometimes. Anyway, keep at it and have fun. It's cool to play around with this stuff.
Ah, I see what you’re saying. Due diligence and all that-in the absence of Option types you still have to remember to “Look Before You Leap” even if the language doesn’t force you to.
@@RonWolfHowl I'm not trying to be antagonistic. I'm just saying there's a lot wrong with that code. For example: Cube cube = *cubes.begin(); - Even ignoring the UB it makes a copy. Bad. for ( BluePrint bp : bps ) - It makes a bunch of copies. Very bad. int globalMax; - read/write globals (especially in a loop) are terrible for cache. Bad. getTotal( const BluePrint& bp, Elements inventory, Elements rates, int minutesLeft ) - Copies struct arguments by value. Extremely bad. I could go on and on and on... I'm sorry if I sound like an a-hole. It's just making any sorts of performance conclusions from this code is pointless.
@@ChrisAverageYT This happens so much honestly whenever people are trying to make a case for Rust compared to C++. It's so very ingenuine and shows a clear bias to me. I even read the blog and it was similar: Shows really bad and archaic C++ compared to Rust. Like it goes out of its way to make C++ look slow to try and swing some Rust-hype and engagement their way. The C++ source code has so many issues like you mentioned. Lots of deep copies and weirdly designed patterns...I wish these comparisons were more genuine but it feels like there is a clear agenda here.
Let's be honest: in most real-world applications the calling conventions affect performance way less than many other factors. That being said, real-world implementations of C++ also suck in that aspect: you can't just pass unique_ptr in registers because it's not trivially copyable! AFAIR, Rust's doesn't have that issue with Box.
I don't think you're interested in an answer but I'll take this chance to point out that C++ is well-established in the game industry because in part because it is much, much older. A bunch of AAA game engines are made with it and have been that way for a while, so there's a lot of inertia. I also want to point out the wonderful work being done/sponsored by Embark Studios on a bunch of projects, and the Bevy engine, which looks better every week (it is not competing with something like Unreal Engine though).
that's not true. the main reason is legacy. the other reason i could think of is friction, Rust have a lot of constrains and friction, you see how many indie devs jump to Unity because it easier to code with C# and they don't have AAA performance requirement, so that part is out of window for Rust and C++. with Rust if they want to have C++ level of performance they need to write unsafe Rust (that's a whole different debate how safe is unsafe Rust), and have to put up with Rust borrow checker, and you know how they love to hack shjt to meet deadline. it is very hard to say what the benefit would be from Rust safety for games, there isn't study, data or even good metrics, just a bunch of baseless claim from Rust shill. I would kill for a static reflection, and generative programming in C++ (which is a C++ pain point in games dev tooling and shjts), but i'm not sure rust procedural macros is the answer they are looking for. hornestly, maybe try Jai when it come out, than switching from C++ to Rust.
Uhhh... the benchmark games shows C++ is faster than Rust though. And the few cases were Rust were faster than C++ were because Rust was using a faster method for the computations. Also, Rust uses LLVM and the benchmark games C++ programs use gcc which IMO generates slower code compared to LLVM
Here's the page for the n-body program specifically: benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/performance/nbody.html I'm sure we can find one of the challenges where the fastest solution is C++. I'll find one now. There! benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/performance/fannkuchredux.html You will note that in the context in which this particular benchmark is mentioned, the point being made is that Node.js isn't as slow as one would think, compared to the fastest solution at this current date. There's no mention of C++ yet at this point.
See, what happens is: people will look at the title and assume we're cheering for different sports teams. But here's the thing: I'm not cheering for any team. I'm very familiary with one of them, but overall I just really like the sport, and I can't get enough of analyzing it and trying to understand its more subtle nuances. So your comment really isn't a gotcha anymore than my video is. Have a nice day!
Learning what endl and remove_if are would have saved you from this embarrassment. It's ok to be bad at C++, just not with misleading titles like this.
4:15 So you're comparing buffered c++ to unbuffered rust. Why didn't you write an unbuffered c++ version? This is my main pet pieve when people compare languages. Compare the same thing. Implement the same thing.
I didn't write the C++ version. I ported someone else's C++ to Rust, so it would make sense to get the Rust port as close as possible to the original at first, and then experiment with how to make it faster.
![กี่หมื่นฟ้า | Your Sky Series EP.1 [1/4]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vLGjxFL6U_I/mqdefault.jpg)
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
Rust & C++ code is here: gist.github.com/fasterthanlime/b2e261c3d1492171d6a46edf620a0728
If someone's watching this going "I /know/ I can beat that by tweaking the C++ code", you should do it! I think there's a lot of good that can happen with some friendly competition between the C++ and Rust camps, as long as we both treat it from a "huh, neat that we can get compilers to do that!" perspective and not just shout at each other from opposite side of a virtual stadium.
I'll try to make a full write-up that goes a little deeper (maybe comparing emitted IR between clang and rustc), but first I have more research to do.
You might want to pin this comment, so it doesn't get lost. Atleast until someone makes an optimized C++ version.
Definitely need to get someone who knows relatively-modern C++ to refactor this more idiomatically (might even try it myself). So many macros and C-style code.
And immediately de-referencing begin() is not undefined behaviour, it’s programmer error - the programme did exactly what it was told it to do.
@@decky1990 i dont consider anyone who write using namespace std; as a C++ programmer, because if they had access to any decent C++ teaching materials they would have known using namespace std; is REALLY REALLY lame. if they have heard they shouldn't use using namespace std; and keep using it then they aren't seriously enough and treating C++ as a toy language that for lame competitions. is this gate keeping, yes, but is is it unreasonable to expect this, no. Maybe because there are so many bad youtube shorts, tiktok videos about C++ out there is become a norm. I couldn't believe that @fasterthanlime think this is how people write C++ and use this kind of code to compare with Rust (5:00 section).
There's also a lot of unecessary by value copying on the C++ implementation. Quick examples I've noticed is in the for-each loop and when populating an object then passing it to a push_back() of a vector. Though I'm not sure how much of that impacts performance.
There's performance left on the table from using cout and endl since the implementation of those two are notorious for slow IO without some configuring.
@@tsunekakou1275 aye the namespace directive is a bit of a faux pas. I’ve heard stroustrup kills a kitten every time some uses it. I suppose this was my cry for more idiomatic writing. I don’t want to beat the guy up for posting interesting content, but maybe get someone who specialises in the language instead of Jack-of-all-trading them, such that they’re all average implementations. Would be a really interesting comparison.
As soon as I saw the C++ solution I knew that it wasn't written by someone who knows C++ all that well so I decided to attempt my own solution. My solution ended up being around 4000x faster. C++ and Rust are close enough that the deciding factor for any non-trivial task is almost always going to be the algorithms used, not the language. So study your algorithms, folks. :P
truly insane how many orders of magnitude are hidden to be optimized even in millisecond programs.
@@arthurpenndragon6434Once you get used to looking at the disassembly, it's pretty easy to make 3 order improvements consistently, on other people's software anyway...
Algorithms rules supreme
Fair. What you are is a specialist. The acreage cpp programmer wouldn't go into your level of detail .. but I must ask, are you still using cpp if you are optimising the compiler?
@@bluedark7724 Knowing algorithms has nothing to do with optimizing the compiler
I know **just** enough low level computer magic to understand this, but man was it work. This was very well presented, I've seen much simpler things explained with far less clarity.
This is perhaps the best compliment I've received all year. I know the year is young, but still! I'm really happy that the video is understandable at some level - it's really hard to strike a good balance between "obvious to a lot of regulars" and "desperately impenetrable".
@@fasterthanlimea big part is your delivery takes you through the emotional journey(like saying “let’s not talk about that, and hopefully never again”, about an especially complicated topic) which makes it a lot more engaging than other comparatively similar videos.
I dont understand it my head gone blank 😭 do i need to study more ??? can you tell me something in which i can learn about it
@@spoofilybeloved6729 absolutely, their approach is much more like a teacher who wants to ensure you can follow along and feel included. A lot of presenters will pride themselves on knowing something and make you feel small for not understanding.
I failed to understand SIMD section, but i understood general principle and difference between 2 cases. It means that you explanation is really great. And i’m not even a developer or a programmer.
Love the video! Absolute madness at the end, LLVM is probably such mess at this point because of the optimization priorities that it takes a team of compiler engineers a couple of days to even trace a problem lol, but they are the real heroes
The Static Single Assignment (SSA) form that LLVM IR uses simplifies dataflow dramatically. In Rust, it's a bit more SSA like due to borrow checker rules limiting aliasing, while C++ aliases at will, which can cause some optimizers to be disabled since the dataflow (and if it could have changed) is un provable at compile time.
This is the kind of thing that every optimizing compiler has to deal with.
Ok sir, tell me a non mess compiler infra then
Maybe you doubt, that I - not a rust expert -can write code slower than c++ one? I can, trust me. Another question is proficiency level of the one who wrote these C++ solutions that were ported.
@@darshanbhat9457I think you misunderstood. They aren't dissing on LLVM at all; it's a mess by necessity
This video is really great! I also did Advent of Code with Rust and it really helped.
It's really refreshing to listen about Assembly in a clear, non-scary way.
I'm glad you felt that way! As I rewatched along during the premiere, I was convinced everyone would drop off as soon as the assembly section started, but maybe it's because I've heard those sections a hundred times while editing already!
@@fasterthanlime No way! More assembly plz
@@fasterthanlimeThe graphics were excellent, I doubt I would have followed along otherwise.
"This has been an ongoing fight for years according to sources who are very tired"
I felt this in my soul
I remembered Go.
I do think it’s interesting the difference in knowledge of the two languages and what is “easier”. I know C++ very well I would say and I’ve never even touched rust, but when he went over the operator overload functions and mentioned how C++ was difficult and rust was “just implementing a trait like any other”. This made me audibly laugh since for me C++ overload is super easy and clean, when I saw the rust code at 5:56 it looked insanely bloated and had characters that seemed absolutely useless.
I’m not trying to bash Rust or the knowledge Faster, just pointing out how coding in a language with little knowledge creates MASSIVE bias and situations like this where something is “simple” just because you know it.
I completely agree with what you're saying, but I think the point he was getting at is the Rust way is a typical trait implementation. I think he meant that if you know even a minimal amount of Rust then you're going to know how to use traits whereas operator overloading is extra knowledge in C++. Also, he did simplify it down to simply writing #[derive(PartialOrd)] right after :P
@@RottenFishbone even the simplified went right over my head👀
exactly my thoughts! overloading couldn't be easier in C++
"hard to remember"... lmao.
@@RottenFishbone i wouldn't say "overloading is extra knowledge in C++", it's not template level difficulty, you can learn overloading after a week or two. sure overloading has a lot of thing going on there but at least it in your face instead hiding. you could argue Rust PartialOrd is newbie friendly but i kinda disagree with that even.
I spent weeks of my life shoving SIMD into an unreal engine module to leverage new cpu architectures and you managed to sum up basically 3 weeks of pain into 20 minutes and I still understood it better than all the formal sources I bled my eyes at. Compiler engineers deserve all of the love in the world and they are criminally under appreciated.
compilers are AI
The conclusion that compiler engineers need hugs and cats need petting are both true.
Sometimes it's even the other way around! ...if you know each other well, of course.
Just a note, if you're using the same "backend" eg: llvm for rust and c++ the results should be similar, the reality is though while llvm is a generalized backend for multiple languages, it's history is primarily to support the clang frontend. Essentially you're comparing how well integrated one frontend is with another so don't be too surprised if rust falls behind c++.
The add_examples issue is due in part to padding. Your struct with 3 members is likely being handed off to the compiler and it sees a struct which isn't perfectly aligned to a power of 2. So while you're thinking you're dealing with 3 64 bit registers the compiler's going to treat that struct as 4 64 bit registers. While you're right that you're just adding 6 64 bit integers together, what you've likely done is trip up an optimization stage because the compiler sees 8 64 bit integers (where the 4th and 8th are essentially discarded) and that likely is enough for simd optimizations to kick in (where adding 6 may not be worth doing) and then confuse later optimization stages.
How is this llvm's and not rusts' fault? The only stable backend for Rust is LLVM. It was their(rust creators) decision to use LLVM. They could've written their own backend(which would've been a disaster) but they didn't.
I think it's completely fair to compare Rust and C performance by how well they work with LLVM
@@igorordecha I get your point but I disagree. It could easily happen that a future release of clang or gcc outperforms rust just by tweaking how it interacts with compiler. Or someone could write a transpiler from c++ to rust and then compile code that way. I have to say that i don't agree that any this video does not demonstrate that one language is superior or inferior to the other.
@@mvuksano rust might be better language (and it is) as far as the spec and syntax go BUT with current tooling it IS slower* than C. It doesn't have to be that way in the future but it is slower* now. And that is what this video shows. It isn't "not fair comparison" because at the end of the day the binary built with rust is worse*. Yes, it's not the Rust's fault. It's the tooling's fault but it directly make the language worse (for now)
* yes, as shown in this video, you can make the binary faster by tweaking the number of arguments but in the real world you're not changing the API because the compiler has a bug.
This point (and all its replies) is very good - as is the whole video and many more of the reply comments. I'm just about to embark on learning Rust (and Go at the same time), and although this is definitely not my first computer language rodeo (I used to be somewhat of a collector (some might say hoarder) of computer languages, but the number of languages available has now gotten somewhat ahead of my rate of collecting them), I'm glad I saw this video first.
What I've learned here, is that if you want to write performant Rust code (on X86 target CPU, say), you're gonna have to learn how to outsmart the combination of the Rust compiler plus LLVM plus all the cumulative stupidities of the 50-year process of patching the X86 instruction architecture plus especially the well-motivated but often badly implemented SIMD instructions. One problem is that the code generation process does not have sufficient knowledge of the approximate relative performance of various instructional/architectural approaches to ASM-coding the given Rust code. If it did, it could at least loop over the several aproaches and reject using those SIMD instructions when the extra wasted execution time makes it such that using SIMD slow down the execution. There probably needs to be finer gained compiler control over its use of SIMD (not sure what's available at this point). You don't want to tell it not to use SIMD at all, just to un-screw-up its compilation a function for X = Y + Z, when later in the code you have a whole huge section that definitely needs the SIMD instructions.
Also, it's clear to me that (assuming I'm targeting X86 again, for sake of argument) I'm gonna have to learn the ugly X86 instruction set in order to do performance tuning in Rust. Darn, I thought I could just use Rust, but at the same time not only avoid the inanities of C++, but also say to the option of "learn X86 ASM" been-there-done-that-earlier-in-my-career with a much better computer architecture so really don't want to go down that road again only this time with a horrible X86 instruction-set architecture.
One wonders whether, in spite of the fact that Rust is not an interpreted language and thus does not require a formal byte-code intermediate language technically speaking, it might not be a great idea to define a (better than Java and perfectly defined for a hypothetical Rust virtual machine that matches well against current X86 and Arm architectures) Rust byte-code architecture, and then compile Rust to that Rust VM, then send that on to LLVM for final compilation to target machine. You could maybe make that first to-byte-code translation smarter, say smart enough that the Rust coder doesn't have to stand on his/her head just to outsmart the current combo of Rust + LLVM.
its*
Just glancing over the C++ code it could definitely be improved by:
Removing the globals
Removing the horrific macros (for endl specifically)
The constants could be made into constexpr constants (i.e real constants, not text replacement)
Removing the using namespace std
Removing the `typedef` struct (this has never been a required thing in C++, this is pure C)
Replacing the remaining typedefs with using
Adding defaulted comparison operators for the structs that would essentially all be one liners without any user defined bodies (structs are just classes, they can have member functions, even though the operators would be friended and not technically members).
Not much about performance itself which could probably also be improved, just cleaning up the code immensely by following the c++ core guidelines.
Yeah I mentioned in the Day 18 write-up that these solutions felt a lot like "C/C++", not "proper C++", but like you said I don't think any of these actually would impact performance. I would really hate if the original author would get negative feedback from all that though 😬
Thanks for the C++ refresher!
@@fasterthanlime There are lots of needless deep-copies in the C++ code that would certainly effect performance though...
Interesting points, I didn't know that the typedef wasn't needed in C++.
@@Wunkolo Yeah when doing a for each the code should be doing it by reference, i:e: for ( BluePrint& bp : bps ) {
The copies are certainly making it slower.
i'm a C++ programmer, but these thing
"C++ would have been fixed if thet remove preprocessor,
Removing the globals,
The constants could be made into constexpr constants Removing the typedef struct,
Replacing the remaining typedefs with using"
C++ can't remove this features... cuz if they did, it will destroy the backward compatibility with C & the past version.
so yeah, it can improve C++... but they can't remove this features, and it will never for a long time. and if u wanna write a faster and a good code... then just don't use these features u mentioned them.
"If you see a compiler engineer in the wild, ask if they need a hug." 😂 Very interesting to see the differences in compilation between C++ and Rust, and the effects of Stack vs register allocation illustrated so well. Great video, tons of information packed in a very short space. Thank you.
Your way of describing complex SIMD instructions was superb, congrats Amos!
Matt Godbolt has a podcast (two's complement), and on the latest episode he quoted 'the first rule of profiling is that you're wrong' by which he means (I'm assuming) it is virtually impossible to guess the performance of a piece of code, or know which version will be faster as you illustrated here nicely.
So I'm guessing the answer to the question in the title is 'it depends' or just 'they are similar'
Like most titles in the form of a question, that one's not really meant to be answered - but I agree, they both performed pretty close to each other (and I still want to have a C++ person look at it - which I'm hoping this video will achieve).
Being wrong is something I'm trying to get better at, since every time you're wrong is an opportunity to learn something, and I love to learn. Here my first two go-to tools (callgrind & not-perf) revealed themselves to be not so useful and I was forced to stare at assembly for a long while, which I think is a happy outcome for everyone!
The title is very clickbaity of course. It doesn't make sense to compare languages for performance; rather, we compare compilers' codegen, which is what the video demonstrates.
@@fasterthanlime If you would like C++ opinions, I suggest you post this on r/cpp. You might not get a warm reception but you will get opinions.
Thank you for the recommendation of the Matt Godbolt podtcast. Thanks to you i started to listen to it and i am enjoying it so far.
@@AdvancedSoul well, you can compare programming language features by performance, because some can be implemented faster than others. Rust and C++ are basically the same in this regard though. With a theoretical advantage for Rust because it often knows more about borrowing, but that is currently not exploited by the LLVM backend.
So yeah between Rust and C++ it comes down to what the compiler does and if you use LLVM for C++ it will come done to some very random implementation details.
Well, that escalated quickly. Came for Rust, got to Assembler. I wish I learned this in the university, it is so fascinating. Makes me think how many decisions were taken for us in higher level languages. Thank you for the deep dive and clear explanation. I feel complete… Turing complete now 😅
Rust's type system, by ITSELF, is turing complete.
@@runed0s86so are C++ templates hehe
Great video. I love the low-level stuff, and compiler writers definitely deserve many hugs. I have my own toy compiler written in Rust, and even implementing the dumbest register allocator possible was already worth at least two hugs per day, because debugging even the tiniest of changes means reading screens of assembly code, interpreting that in your head and trying to keep up with tons of info, such as which variable should sit in which register, what registers are spilled at a particular point, etc. That's hard even given that I "cheated" and decided to generate code for RISC-V, which is much simpler than x86 or amd64, and I'm just playing around. I don't know if I am even able to write a more sophisticated one correctly with my ADHD and average intellectual abilities. How hard is what serious compiler devs do? Probably insanely hard.
The good thing is I have a cat too (btw she has the same pattern on her forehead as your cat). Whenever I feel overwhelmed with coding, she's always there for me. By that I mean she is sleeping nearby, not caring even a little bit about my struggle with my own inability to think clearly. But occasionally, she jumps on my lap and gently reminds me of things more important than code, such as scratching her cheeks 😁
What language are you creating the compiler for?
The content was really great, super informative. It was like reading one of your blog posts but in video form.
I watched the day 18 stream and learned a ton.
Some of the assembly stuff went over my head but that's just because I'm not too familiar with it. But even so, it was explained well. I'll definitely be coming back to watch it again once I know more about assembly.
MIPS Assembly is the easiest to read and understand.
5:05 Replacing whatever C++ map you were using with absl::flat_hash_map or some other high performance map implementation would probably have significantly improved the C++ performance. But you're right you need a certain level of experience in C++ to know that the standard library map types are kind of shit for performance.
5:50 In C++20 you can just do `auto operator(const Cube&, const Cube&) = default` and the compiler will automatically implement a lexicographic comparator, like the Rust derived comparator. While this is a fairly recent feature, I would consider it something every C++ programmer should know, just like every Rust programmer should know about derive, because it is so useful.
On one final note, having recently been comparing some C++ and Rust code for performance, I'll say that one Rust feature that can often give it an advantage over C++ is destructive moves, which allow the Rust compiler to make some good optimizations when passing objects by move that would not be possible in C++.
"I felt pretty stupid while reading it, and I wish you the exact same- that just means you found something you can learn about." 2:57
That's a great way of putting it, and it makes me a lot more comfortable learning that I'm not the only "stupid" one when it comes to working with and learning to code. Thanks for that!
I was rewarded not just with knowledge, but also with a cat video at the end. Obviously this is now the best video ever.
19:25 😻
There's still more layers of complexity. Code speed differs depending on whether the instructions/data hit the on-chip cache which in turn depends on the level and size of the cache. Also, optimal alignment of data can make an utterly huge speed difference (address boundary of 8 vs 16 vs 32 vs 64 vs 128). Ultimately, all these factors will be optimized by compiler backends which have been trained by machine learning. I'm an old compiler guy who is spending his retirement on doing just this. I'm betting we can dump LLVM for a machine-instruction-machine-learning-neural-network.
That is true (and way beyond the scope of this video). I remember seeing some stuff re: machine-learning driven register allocation in LLVM, but I have no idea if it's actually mainstream enough to, say, be used by default in rustc. Do you happen to know? I'm curious!
Turn compilers into an even bigger black box! It would be scary if a malicious AI corrupted compilers so that all programs would contain silently executing code to do...something.
@@HansLemurson nevermind those extra skynet instructions
@@StanleyPinchak Just a few socket interrupts and some speculative execution...nothing to see here...
I believe the reason that 3×u64x2 uses registers where 2×u64x3 uses stack is as simple as the Rust ABI having a ScalarPair mode to pass scalar pairs (like slice references, or other structs which are just two ints) as two separate arguments. So before LLVM sees it, the function taking 3×u64x2 gets turned into a function taking 6×u64. The 2×u64x3 is given to LLVM as a function taking two pointers.
IIRC LLVM does actually have the ability to pass more complex types than just scalars in function arguments (i.e. virtual registers), but rustc never uses this functionality because the semantics of compound types in LLVM don't line up well with Rust's semantics.
Interesting! Can you expand on "the semantics of compound types in LLVM don't line up well with Rust's semantics"? Preferably in blog post form, 2 pages minimum, no maximum, you have 4 hours ago, ready set go (just kidding, but I would love to read more about this if you feel like posting a link to something!)
@@fasterthanlime for simple and "full" types like u64x3 here, I don't think there's any difference. I honestly know very little, just that rustc only uses LLVM's compound types for field offset indexing and lowers padding to explicit fields. I also think compound types in LLVM may also carry TBAA implications, though that wouldn't matter if only used for passing compound types as function arguments.
The TL;DR version is quite literally just that doing pass-by-reference for all compound types is simple, sufficient, obviously correct, and doesn't impede inlining optimization.
Those are words
heh, "you have 4 hours ago"... gg on making us feel way too familiar within this environment! xD
This is the first video I have seen from you, and I have to say, it made me sure I want to see more from this channel. Such well present, such cat, such content.
You have a really nice style, keep it up.
Love your blog posts. Keep doing what you're doing. It's great. 👍
Thanks!! I'm glad I'm finally able to release videos on par with my posts, there was a big gap for a while and the audiences for both didn't intersect much.
For the C++ version, I'd suggest making the operator functions static and turning bps into a local variable in main.
"What's faster? C++ or Rust? Trick question! It's x86 Assembly! get ready to get comfortable with some goddamn registers!" on a lighter note WHY IS SIMD SUCH A BLACK BOX
Incredible video. I am going to share it with everyone in the company I run! Keep up the ultra-nerdy-geeky subjects & explanations, you are REALLY good at it and makes this kind of high level stuff very accessible to whoever is listening.
Extremely high-quality explanation, I'll make sure to send this to whoever wants an introduction to the world of assembly and the wild west of compiler optimizations!
I don't comment very often, but I have to say I really enjoyed this deep dive on why C++ was faster.
Keep it up!
/s? 😂
@@plasticstuff69 Typical Crab
It took a Rust expert digging into assembly to beat a naive C++ implementation (sometimes). So, yeah. Agreed.
if both use llvm as backend, they are similar, if c++ use gcc instead llvm then they can different, but rust can use gcc too, so they are similar. now take a look to the feature, rust give more feature and its design is 100% memory safe, preventing memory leaks that can happen in c++ when building big project with many people that they may forget to delete a variabel after unused.
@@doublekamui exactly what smart pointers are made for
5:50 operator overloading is quite simple, the OP just had no idea how to do it. And the spaceship operator in C++20 helps immensely in comparisons. It's basically the same as your cmp function.
Pro tip: only write C++ if you know how to use it.
So how do you get to that point?
@@Hacking-Kitten Same way as any other language: use it in real life projects for at least 10 years.
How did it take the algorithm this long to show me your videos. I've read all your articles as I see them show up on Reddit. Happy to see your videos are just as interesting.
The thing about C++ is that it is very easy to make suboptimal choices in writing the code. A person doing C++ for 10 years is nowhere near an expert but even then you could easily make a single mistake and have your code run 2000x slower than it needs to be. But the good thing about C++ is: if you’re allowed to make “non-faithful” changes to code, you could theoretically turn your problem into an exercise to be done by the compiler and at run time it does the minimum amount of work. Potentially have the answer of the question be a value literal. C++ will always be in a weird place where it has to maintain some weird compatibility with C, which allows it to piggyback off of the work of really smart people that work on C, but also inadvertently carrying all the baggage and weird crap from C. Rust fortunately doesn’t have this problem because it was designed from the ground up pretty recently.
Die-hard C++ developer here. I've been thinking for a long time that I should give Rust a try. Some really cool concepts, fast and very expressive. To be fair C++ has been progressing a lot in the last years and people are usually complaining about ancient C++03 while they should be using C++17 or 20 by now...
с++20 concepts are so odd, it feels like a different language now.
Decades ago at this point I had our compiler team rant about register optimization. To this day, I'm convinced it's all black magic.
Good job with the video! I'm not too comfortable with assembly but the way you explained with visualisations helped a lot.
I actually used pshufd to move half cat parts to both halves of an XMM register. Beware: if you get the `order` operand wrong, things get weird. Real weird.
I love the way you explain function calls and argument passing, it's like a crash course of what the compiler does in "higher level" languages, explained to an audience of 50 year old 6502 programmers hahaha! Really a great way to go about it IMO, well explained but not dumbed down ELI5 style :-)
One thing to add: if you use registers of SIMD instructions, the program takes more time to resume during kernel’s context switching because we need to save/load data for extra registers.
That is one of the reasons why utilizing extra registers (like -march=native) results in slower code.
Most of the C++ optimization happens in the flags when you are compiling, and as you said you had trouble even in linking. So, I could say somebody who's experienced in C++ can definitly beat RUST. Moreover, guys please don't get into this nonesense comparisons, depending on your application you should choose the language.
potentially rust and c++ can be "lowered" to pure C by the programmer will 😄 It's true - performance comparison for rust and c++ is nosence
This is an absolutely fantastic video! Loved the way you described SIMD instructions! Respect! 🙌🙌🙌🙌
I wish to see an x86 programming tutorial course from you!
To include binary data into c++ on Linux, creat the binary file and use LD with the right input file type flag to generate a .o file, that object file will have two symbols for the start and end of the data which you can access by declaring the right arrays with the right names (no length values required) something like unsigned char symbol_start[]; where you replace "symbol" according to the symbols name.
This is what language comparison videos should always be like
“It’s been an ongoing fight, according to sources who are very tired.”
Literally almost spit out my drink. That is some quality wit, characteristic of this whole, excellent video.
I think that it's important to consider the development time of the application, when talking about speed. Which is why Javascript is so popular, despite being slower than C++.
Rust seems to be an amazing middle ground with speeds that compete with well written C++ code! Thanks for the video.
Oh definitely. You should also take into account maintenance costs, otherwise you end up with Go 🙃
@@fasterthanlime I used to write some small scale programs in Go 2-3 years ago, switched to Rust since. Can you elaborate how Go programs grow unmaintainable that‘s specific to the language?
I am just curious.
The short answer: it doesn't really matter. These types of micro-optimizations are only relevant for very, very specific use cases. People are writing production code in Java, Python, hell even JavaScript.
Sometimes the C++ compiler will generate better code and sometimes Rust. I would say C++ has a slight advantage because of how long it's been out there but on the other side Rust can potentially surpass it because of how explicit it is: the compiler has just more information and safety guarantees and can thus find more shortcuts.
I'd open an issue on that or reach out to one of the core devs. That seems like an oversight from the compiler team. Has to be some issue with the IR code that's generated not playing nice with LLVM
So a friend of mine who's a rustc contributor looked into it some. This is the closest report I could find: github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/26494#issuecomment-619506345 - according to them, it's an extremely common report with no easy solution, most PRs to "fix it" introduce regressions 🙃
the ScalarPair ABI in rustc might be slightly suspect here too - it makes 2-element structs special
@@KaneYork that seems likely - it's probably what my compiler friend tried to explain to me and it flew right over my head.
@@fasterthanlime solving this seems like it is related to the bin packing problem only a little bit more complicated because of things like alignment requirements.
Rust expert/C++ novice puts in a lot of effort to make Rust implementations faster than naive C++ implementations. Finds that those Rust implementations are sometimes faster.
I love your Advent of code articles! I already picked up some new Rust knowledge!
And your writing style is really nice!
was very impressed with how knowledgeable you seemed and thought to myself why I hadn't seen you before but then I saw the channel name and everything clicked haha
That's hilarious. Now you know what I sound and look like!
been reading your articles for a while, never knew you had a youtube channel. loving all the content, keep it up!
Thanks! I do link to my latest video at the bottom of every article, but seeing how long my articles are, maybe I should put them higher up 🥲
C++ leaves certain behaviors undefined because it allows the compiler more freedom and tricks for optimization. Rust being a bit more strict for "safety", can in some cases constrict what contortions the compiler is allowed to do.
Although that's true, 1) I don't believe there's any actual UB here, at least not any that lets the compiler optimize more, 2) it goes the other way too! See news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25624538 (afaik noalias has been enabled for a few stable versions - until another bug is found, it's had a comical track record)
That “.begin()” thing -- you have to compare it to “.end()” first, and it’s only safe to dereference if they are not equal.
I know very little C++, but I do remember that.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 hat off to you, seem like not everyone was fooled. (not sarcasm)
this is the most underrated youtube video title I've seen for some time... thanks!
For what it's worth, in C++20 you no longer need to implement comparison operators if they're doing normal lexical comparison:
auto operator (const Type&) const = default;
you would think he should have known that when he use that C++ vs Rust title.
Thanks so much for the very kind shout out!
Awesome video. Really enjoyed it. Keep up the excellent work! Cute sponsor.
Your feedback has been relayed to the sponsor in question, whose only comment was: mrrraw.
This was really educational, for the parts that didn't go over my head. Nice chiptunes, btw!
Thanks for the great video! I'd like to see how some more complicated language features (such as fat pointer/vtable, or enum vs tagged union) may affect the compiling result and the performance
That would be interesting! My guess is that, like here, they're fairly close. One area where I think we'd see a real difference is noalias, but I need to figure out how to showcase it.
Man, SIMD instructions are scary - it makes sense, the way you explained them, but they're still scary.
Modern complied languages should be reasonably comparable in performance, and in any case compiler writers will leap frog each other as they improve compilers. I program in C++ even though it's the most hacked up language ever. At one point I considered going to Rust, but the first thing I needed was placement new, which the Rust guys told me it didn't have. In addition I got advised to redesign my code if I can't directly port it from C++ to Rust. At that point I gave up. In general I find these days the way your data is organized is far more important than the the kind of stuff your talking about here and C++ lets you do close to anything in that department. But again it's an annoying hacked up language and it's getting more hacked up each year.
Just do C-style C++ and ignore everything in the standard Library and thats it, no stupidly hacked code unreadable templates and OOP nonsense.
If you care about performance and you are already thinking in terms of data layout you are probably already doing this, but just in case I had to say it.
Also you could consider using one of the new C replacement languages like Odin, I've heard they are really nice, Rust is indeed a stupid language to use if you don't care about hardcore Security, the kind of restrictions Rust imposes on you are pointless in that case.
elegant but hardcore assembly deep dive, very few coders have such advanced knowledge on programming
Why C++ programmers don't try to prove their language is faster than something else? They don't need to
if both use llvm as backend, they are similar, if c++ use gcc instead llvm then they can different, but rust can use gcc too, so they are similar. now take a look to the feature, rust give more feature and its design is 100% memory safe, preventing memory leaks that can happen in c++ when building big project with many people that they may forget to delete a variabel after unused.
Rust don't give anithing. And this is Very funny
And when you need to write something lowlevel,you Should use unsafe modificator or how ir called in that piece of crap. And like candy. Uou can usr leaks or valgrind,which give you full info about memory leaks. Fact that you fidn't know about it, tell everyone level of understanding of this topic .
I have encountered assembly briefly from looking at some disassembly projects in the video game preservation community.
Anything that helps me understand what is going on with assembly in practical and easy-for-newcomers terms is really fascinating and helpful to me. Want to know what those Game Boy Color games were doing under the hood!
Thanks for this video, seems really impartial but also very human. Just what I like to see in the tech space. Heart > factionalism! Neutral reviews of the tech can both serve as documentation *and* impetus for those who are closer to the tech to maybe improve the state of the art based on really having the problem laid out in front of them. Takes you out of the fog and makes you go "hmm, yeah, maybe that thing right there".
Top tier content. Yearning for more!
I have a few other good ones, but be warned that as you go back in time, you'll see myself get worse and worse at script writing, performing, shooting, and editing. Thanks for the kind words!
@@fasterthanlime This format really with fluid and beautiful code presentation while diving deep into interesting concepts of computing is surely the best match for my tastes, but I still really enjoyed some of your other videos and they are all really good so.. thank you for your hard work!
Best sponsored segment ever!
Decent video. Obviously, everything done in one language can be done in the other one as well. When it comes to optimizing stuff like this, it's mostly "luck" as to which language's libraries are more suited for the job at hand. I don't think "which is faster" could ever be an actual question. There's many other far better questions: "which is safer?", "which is easier to learn?", "which one allows for better expressiveness?", "which one is the better option for embedded?", and so on.
We're roughly in agreement but let me pick two nits: there's definitely things you can do in C++ that you can't do in safe Rust, simply because the borrow checker doesn't understand them. And I say that as a pretty vocal Rust advocate but that's just... the deal we made with the compiler. (And there's still research/improvements ongoing, but, yeah.)
Re safety/learning curve/expressiveness: I covered that /briefly/ when comparing the two codebases, but it probably warrants more in-depth coverage. I would of course need to do a bunch more research about C++ first. This is all the aftermath of some casual stream and I thought it could be an interesting watch for folks who are like "I hear Rust is safe and that sounds good but that also means it _has_ to be slower, right?". Thanks for watching!
@@fasterthanlime On the other hand, I find there are many things that you can do in safe Rust that you can't do in C++, not because of limits in the language but because of limits on your own sanity
@@squelchedotter That's very true but it's also a harder sell for folks who aren't /already/ into Rust. I sound like a madman writing "it's great, just try it" all year round: to most it just sounds like I'm in a cult, and that explains a lot about the dynamics of the interactions between the Rust community & the greater programming community.
there is no "better" questions. depends on what the project requirements or what resources on hands. i don't need safety so i don't need Rust. Rust is just as hard as C++, so there is no win there for both of them, "which one allows for better expressiveness?", expressiveness is not on the top of my list, i write my C++ quite expressive and i happy with that level of "expressiveness" for my projects, Rust abuse abbreviation is a minus for me (get a C vibe), what is Box, what is Rc (yes i know it RefCount), Arc (yes i know it Atomic RefCount). "which one is the better option for embedded?" no idea, mostly don't care. which is faster, they are similar or at least not the performance win margin that i would care. which compile faster? likely Rust would lose on that, i have never seen a benchmark that Rust won on compile time. which is more restrictive? Rust is more restrictive, for me it a lose, for others it might be a win. IMO, there isn't a whole lot of reasons to switch from C++ to Rust beside safety, and that is still a stretch, things that need safety require a good spec, Rust spec is like "what am i?".
@@tsunekakou1275 That's what I was trying to point out. The question on speed is mostly subjective as is mostly any other question. If we were trying to compare the 2 languages, there are far more important things that play a role into choosing between rust and C++.
I personally also do C++, people using rust probably got their thing too. Just hoping it's not because it's "faster" in this one picked out case.
Registers don't exist anymore in practice on out of order processors. The registers you SEE in x86 assembly are for humans to read, but the cpu does register renaming. So the boundry between register and stack is very obscure
That's not what register renaming results in. Registers still exist and are still very much different than the memory (stack or heap). What register renaming does is separate physical registers from the publicly available registers. This is completely unrelated to whether something is in a register or on the stack. Register renaming is also independent of out-of-order-execution. A cpu can have either or both or neither.
Awesome format an ini-depth knowledge. Super useful! Makes me want to pick up Rust now :)
What luck! I know someone who has a website full of articles focused on learning Rust! (the Advent of Code 2022 series is a good start - there's probably enough content on fasterthanli.me that it's disorienting)
This quickly went from easy-to-understand to god-level over-the-head stuff!
C++ in binary is faster than everything for math but ya who knows how to do that.
if both use llvm as backend, they are similar, if c++ use gcc instead llvm then they can different, but rust can use gcc too, so they are similar. now take a look to the feature, rust give more feature and its design is 100% memory safe, preventing memory leaks that can happen in c++ when building big project with many people that they may forget to delete a variabel after unused.
Amazing video, thank you so much! You're great at clearly explaining these sorts of concepts in a calm and constructive way
Ah crap, that's right! This is why you don't go off-script!
@@fasterthanlime But you clarifying it as "the function calling the other function" clears up any potential confusion it could've caused, so it's all good
Also I wrote that comment before finishing the video, and I really didn't think I could love it even more. But that ending with "if you ever meet a compiler engineer in the wild, ask if they need a hug" and the sponsored by cat segment are fucking amazing
Great video, as usual! A bit disappointed that I can't use a discount code with cat, but the information more than makes up for it. Wanted to ask, could alignment have something to do with the compiler's choice of using SSE registers, or may that be just because the size is bigger than 16 bytes and the compiler just treats smaller structs as a special case? Though otoh smaller structs could also mean say [u8, u16, u8, u32, u32]...
I think it has more to do with the latter: heuristics based on the maximum argument size the compiler is willing to pass by registers. But I don't feel comfortable making these claims without doing a bunch more research.
Re SIMD, note that the compiler is using movdqu, the unaligned version. I don't think there's any guarantees the struct will be 16-byte-aligned, but I may be talking out of my butt.
Great explanation, I haven't seen any video that explains low level computer wizardry this well.
Nice breakdown. C++ can be used to write optimal code, there isn't a "faster language", excluding specific use cases like neural networks, for which special tools can often produce a better machine code than a regular compiler. Rust can be used for the same kind of optimal code writing in general, except for when one needs special tools and there isn't a Rust interface but there is a C++ one. Examples of such tools include Halide and GPU languages like CUDA.
"If you see a compiler engineer in the wild, ask if they need a hug"
Lol 😆 🤣
Ah yes, the "zero-cost abstractions" being "roll-D20-cost abstractions" as always 😀
Weeeeell in general I would agree with you, as in I'm always skeptical that the compiler would optimize things properly - but this one surprised me, and to me, is a proper bug. I might look into it some more - it's possible to compare clang and rustc generated IR, so troubleshooting is not as inaccessible as it would appear.
Huh? It's just a compiler optimization that wasn't implemented, and the only "abstraction" here is a struct
😂👏👏👏
AS a 1 year later comment(the c++ syntax i will talk about was intrdouced in c++20 so it still would have worked) in c++ you can also automatically let the compiler implement operator, which also implements automatically all the classic comparison operators
I have not done x86 assembler since i was like 12yrs old, still remember that LEA is load effective adress and some opcodes in hexadecimal. Like nop is 90h, and ret is C3h
This video helped me understand SIMD a lot!
Could you maybe make some sort of x86 explanation series, where you also explain some more SIMD instructions?
I recently started learning rust and so far I really like it. Coming from c++ there are a few things that made it hard initially, like type casting being non trivial. Say you have a trait with several implementations for that trait and a function that takes in a trait object, does some checking to figure out what the specific implementation of that trait object is and then call specific functions of that implementation. In c++ you can use dynamic_cast. In rust the only solution that I could come up with after some research was to implement an as_any function and than use ::downcast_ref::variablename.as_ref().as_any().unwrap(). Seems kind of hacky but it led me to an alternative using an enum Type that has specific implementations as fields of the enum variants. That way you can do the same thing without dynamic dispatch which is kind of awesome!
So yes, rust makes some things really hard and annoying but it usually has a better alternative.
The other thing I slightly miss is that function overloading isn't possible. I'd also like to see more flexible operator overloading, but otherwise I really like the language. The fact that moving is the default behavior is awesome. Variables are const by default - amazing. No more const std::vector& when passing a parameter.
You should honestly never use dynamic_cast in c++ haha
static_cast should be the way to go when possible, and reinterpret_cast when you know what you are doing (and use dynamic_cast only in specific cases)
C-style cast should be a big no-no as you do not know which cast will be performed (especially when using templates)
const_cast should be avoided except for very specific usages (or when using C api)
I am no rust developer, therefore I don't see why a move by default (instead of copy) is good (I usually hardly never need to move anything, I always either pass references or copy)
Same goes for the const by default, as const keyword is a no-op in c++, I don't really see its benefits, could you explain them?
@@az-kalaak6215 yeah I know dynamic cast isn't optimal, but in the specific scenario of downcasting in a class hierarchy I think it's the better choice to use dynamic cast because you get a runtime check. But of course you need to check if the cast failed. Static cast is the more dangerous one in this case as it'll lead to undefined behavior at runtime if the object that you are down casting is actually different from the type T in static_cast. Anyway, the example I mentioned came up in testing code, so I wanted to make sure the derived type coming in was actually of the expected type and dynamic cast was the best choice to do that check.
Regarding your question, I don't think it's an advantage for devs who know c++ very well, but the move by default forces you think harder about whether you want to use that object in the future or not. Moves are destructive in rust and the compiler prevents you from using a moved variable unless you reinitialize it with valid data. The fact that const is the default again forces you to think hard if a value needs to be mutable, a function needs to take a non-const reference, etc. These things help the compiler with optimization the generates code.
Of course you could arrive at the same result using c++, but it would be the less concise and non-default option. So it's the one that is probably not always used when it really should be.
That's more or less all I'm saying. Rust gives you defaults that help the compiler optimize code better, which makes it more likely sloppily written up rust code will outperform sloppily written c++ code. In a perfect world, there wouldn't be any sloppy code, but yeah, that's not realistic haha
@@mario7501 ok ok, I understand :o
If I'm correct, it's more a guidance to write clean code rather than a magical formula then
@@az-kalaak6215 yeah more or less. And you can be certain that if you code compiles, it won't have any undefined behavior. Unless you use unsafe, but that's a whole different story.
The traps you kept running into that made the C version of the app faster are bound to be the same traps any new developer would run into as well. This is problematic for Rust.
The other problem for Rust is that they are many more C experts and until there are more Rust experts, C will continue to be the fastest.
Didnt understand a thing, maybe i am too dumb, but it was pretty interesting to hear about it, and now i have something to learn.
Unless you are an expert in both languages you have no business making videos like "c++ vs rust: which is faster", that's all I'm gonna say.
Nice stuff 😁
I remember manually optimizing vector functions in MPI using MMX and SSE commands when this was still the hot stuff and compilers had no clue about them.
Putting in some prefectches here and there to optimize caching helped as well.
That were fun times. 😍
c++ best
Great video and explanation. Love reading your articles, so watching the video was fun.
😘
just pointing out -- on the programming language benchmark game website, you have to scroll all the way down on the toy program page (n-body page for example) to find the unsafe solutions, where you will find even faster submissions. For example, at the time of writing this comment, the fastest is a C submission which is twice as fast.
Makes strong assumption about input data
Writes poor C++ that completely ignores that assumption and invokes UB
Conclusion: C++ bad
Ugh... I see it a lot and it boils my blood every time. C++ is complex, not stupid.
As to the struct and registers "weirdness". It's just alignment and padding, normal stuff. You can instruct your compiler to print struct memory layout to see what happens.
The C++ solution isn't mine, for the record. For Day 19 part 1 (the bulk of the video), the struct layout is exactly the same in both Rust and C++. I'm also not sure where in the video you've heard/seen such a conclusion.
You seem to assume I'm hating on C++ /and/ stupid, which is unfortunate 🤷
@@fasterthanlime I'm not assuming anything about you, except maybe that you have good intentions. Sorry if it came across as an attack. "stupid" was about C++, not you, and the comment was about a tendency I see in many materials - writing poor C++ code and criticizing the language for it. The *begin() example you've shown (no matter who wrote it) fits that perfectly and so I made a frustrated remark. Comparing languages in general is interesting, but you really have to write good code in both first, otherwise it's like comparing two cars without tires to see which one goes faster. I see that a lot with wild conclusions and it just plays on my nerves, so I burst sometimes. Anyway, keep at it and have fun. It's cool to play around with this stuff.
Ah, I see what you’re saying. Due diligence and all that-in the absence of Option types you still have to remember to “Look Before You Leap” even if the language doesn’t force you to.
@@RonWolfHowl I'm not trying to be antagonistic. I'm just saying there's a lot wrong with that code. For example:
Cube cube = *cubes.begin(); - Even ignoring the UB it makes a copy. Bad.
for ( BluePrint bp : bps ) - It makes a bunch of copies. Very bad.
int globalMax; - read/write globals (especially in a loop) are terrible for cache. Bad.
getTotal( const BluePrint& bp, Elements inventory, Elements rates, int minutesLeft ) - Copies struct arguments by value. Extremely bad.
I could go on and on and on...
I'm sorry if I sound like an a-hole. It's just making any sorts of performance conclusions from this code is pointless.
@@ChrisAverageYT This happens so much honestly whenever people are trying to make a case for Rust compared to C++. It's so very ingenuine and shows a clear bias to me. I even read the blog and it was similar: Shows really bad and archaic C++ compared to Rust. Like it goes out of its way to make C++ look slow to try and swing some Rust-hype and engagement their way. The C++ source code has so many issues like you mentioned. Lots of deep copies and weirdly designed patterns...I wish these comparisons were more genuine but it feels like there is a clear agenda here.
What a great video! And most of all, thanks for sponsoring the Cat. 😍
JAVASCRIPT IS AN ANSWER
bruh
yup
memory management... what is what.. am i right..
Let's be honest: in most real-world applications the calling conventions affect performance way less than many other factors. That being said, real-world implementations of C++ also suck in that aspect: you can't just pass unique_ptr in registers because it's not trivially copyable! AFAIR, Rust's doesn't have that issue with Box.
You have to see which one works faster and more reliable in big projects.
That's why most games use C++.
I don't think you're interested in an answer but I'll take this chance to point out that C++ is well-established in the game industry because in part because it is much, much older. A bunch of AAA game engines are made with it and have been that way for a while, so there's a lot of inertia.
I also want to point out the wonderful work being done/sponsored by Embark Studios on a bunch of projects, and the Bevy engine, which looks better every week (it is not competing with something like Unreal Engine though).
@@fasterthanlimeThanks for the answer, I'm not C++ or any language fan. hope to see RUST shine in near future.
that's not true. the main reason is legacy. the other reason i could think of is friction, Rust have a lot of constrains and friction, you see how many indie devs jump to Unity because it easier to code with C# and they don't have AAA performance requirement, so that part is out of window for Rust and C++. with Rust if they want to have C++ level of performance they need to write unsafe Rust (that's a whole different debate how safe is unsafe Rust), and have to put up with Rust borrow checker, and you know how they love to hack shjt to meet deadline. it is very hard to say what the benefit would be from Rust safety for games, there isn't study, data or even good metrics, just a bunch of baseless claim from Rust shill. I would kill for a static reflection, and generative programming in C++ (which is a C++ pain point in games dev tooling and shjts), but i'm not sure rust procedural macros is the answer they are looking for.
hornestly, maybe try Jai when it come out, than switching from C++ to Rust.
@@tsunekakou1275 Fair point.
To be honest, I understand almost nothing you're saying, I just started few months ago, but It's still a vibe to listen to while eating lmao
Uhhh... the benchmark games shows C++ is faster than Rust though. And the few cases were Rust were faster than C++ were because Rust was using a faster method for the computations. Also, Rust uses LLVM and the benchmark games C++ programs use gcc which IMO generates slower code compared to LLVM
Here's the page for the n-body program specifically: benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/performance/nbody.html
I'm sure we can find one of the challenges where the fastest solution is C++. I'll find one now. There! benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/performance/fannkuchredux.html
You will note that in the context in which this particular benchmark is mentioned, the point being made is that Node.js isn't as slow as one would think, compared to the fastest solution at this current date. There's no mention of C++ yet at this point.
15:47 "Aren't you glad you clicked this video?" resulted to be the most nerdy retoric question I've been asked this week.
concluision: c++ is better
lmao
See, what happens is: people will look at the title and assume we're cheering for different sports teams. But here's the thing: I'm not cheering for any team. I'm very familiary with one of them, but overall I just really like the sport, and I can't get enough of analyzing it and trying to understand its more subtle nuances.
So your comment really isn't a gotcha anymore than my video is. Have a nice day!
glad to heard that you jump into the right conclusion 🤣
Just discovered your channel. Pure gold.
Learning what endl and remove_if are would have saved you from this embarrassment.
It's ok to be bad at C++, just not with misleading titles like this.
Wow, great video. Both content-wise and presentation-wise
4:15 So you're comparing buffered c++ to unbuffered rust. Why didn't you write an unbuffered c++ version? This is my main pet pieve when people compare languages. Compare the same thing. Implement the same thing.
I didn't write the C++ version. I ported someone else's C++ to Rust, so it would make sense to get the Rust port as close as possible to the original at first, and then experiment with how to make it faster.