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Zlib-rs is faster than C

(trifectatech.org)
341 points dochtman | 1 comments | 16 Mar 25 19:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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johnisgood ◴[16 Mar 25 20:00 UTC] No.43381735[source]▶
"faster than C" almost always boils down to different designs, implementations, algorithms, etc.

Perhaps it is faster than already-existing implementations, sure, but not "faster than C", and it is odd to make such claims.

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tdiff ◴[16 Mar 25 20:23 UTC] No.43381959[source]▶
Nevertheless Russinovich actually says something in the lines of "simple rewriting in rust made some our code 5-15% faster (without deliberate optimizations)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgptLwP588&t=351s
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pinkmuffinere ◴[16 Mar 25 20:43 UTC] No.43382117[source]▶
I’m sure I’m missing context, and presumably there are other benefits, but 5-15% improvement is such a small step to justify rewriting codebases.

I also wonder how much of an improvement you’d get by just asking for a “simple rewrite” in the existing language. I suspect there are often performance improvements to be had with simple changes in the existing language

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1. maccard ◴[17 Mar 25 06:52 UTC] No.43385793[source]▶
There are hopefully very few things that can be done to low level building blocks. A 15% improvement is absolutely worth it for a library as widely used as a compression library.