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Comment by bdd | Hacker News Reader

These are not about abstractions but compile time optimizations. These are also not implemented in the Rust compiler but LLVM. So any any language frontend in front of LLVM would yield the same optimizations. According to Wikipedia the list is:

> [...] variety of front ends: languages with compilers that use LLVM include ActionScript, Ada, C#, Common Lisp, Crystal, CUDA, D, Delphi, Dylan, Fortran, Graphical G Programming Language,Halide, Haskell, Java bytecode, Julia, Kotlin, Lua, Objective-C, OpenGL Shading Language, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Swift, Xojo, and Zig.

Sometimes I think mention of Rust in the title just gets upvotes without even reading the article, here.

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Only those that emit LLVM code that can be optimized like this.

In poorly performing languages like Python and Ruby calling a method on a value (like sum() or even the += operator) essentially means looking up the method name in a hash table, and then doing a dynamic function call on the resulting function pointer, so this sort of optimizations cannot be done in an ahead-of-time compiler unless all objects are created locally and thus have known method dictionaries (and even then, it depends on whether they are available to the compiler in IR form, whether the lookup code is inlined and whether the code can actually be simplified).

10+ years ago this was true but CRuby's basic operations like += (bytecode is opt_plus followed by setlocal) don't do method lookup unless you redefine them and even if you do then it uses inline caches in the bytecode so there's only one hash lookup.

TruffleRuby has been constant folding trivial code like this since 2014. AOT is also an option.

> essentially means looking up the method name in a hash table, and then doing a dynamic function call on the resulting function pointer

Well, you do need something very much like this if you want to support "openly extensible" classes in a backward- and forward-compatible way. Otherwise you end up with something like the C++ ABI hell where changing things around in a base class breaks every binary that links to earlier versions of that class. This is only a "poorly-performing" pattern inasmuch as the developer is not enabled to "opt out" of that extensibility when that's the sensible choice.

Actually, so there's a very good chance that this particular optimization is happening due to MIRI, which allows very sophisticated constant evaluation of MIR (a rust intermediate representation)

https://rust-lang.github.io/rustc-guide/miri.html

So while, yes, in general pretty much all rust optimizations are actually due to LLVM, this one in particular might not be

Here's the equivalent in C++, compiled with clang 9.0.0 at optimization level 1. https://godbolt.org/z/nKSG9_

Byte for byte identical assembly.

I think it's both about abstraction and compile time optimization. The point was that by default you can write code that uses higher level abstraction but compiles to the same code as an imperative-style loop. Most used languages or default implementations don't use LLVM, moreover they are interpreted or JIT compiled, so there might be different performance between e.g. for-loops vs. forEach with a closure.

Even worse, the lack of proper compiler design courses in many universities or "engineer" bootcamps, means that many attribute to language X, what is actually a compiler backend capability, like you quite well explain.

The C# compiler uses LLVM? Is that for something like Xamarin or something? I was under the impression that it was self-contained. Anyone knows the details of this?

Anyone can build a frontend. "Java bytecode" is in that list too. It doesn't mean defacto compilers of these languages rely on LLVM.

In this case it is Azul Zing, a very serious product. It's one of the four major VM Jit compilers (OpenJ9, C2, Graal are the others in my opinion)

[1] https://www.azul.com/products/zing/

There are also PTC, Aicas, Virtenio, Ricoh and Gemalto all targeted to embededded deployments, of which, PTC and Aicas are the most well known ones.

Sadly Excelsior is no more. I imagine that regular JIT compilers making AOT/JIT caches available, is what killed them.

Unity's burst compiler https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.burst@1.2/manual... uses LLVM, but only supports a somewhat limited subset of C#. I've used it a bit in some performance critical parts of a game and saw some dramatic speed increases. But I can't speak to other parts of the C# ecosystem beyond Unity though.

There are many implementations of C#, a few of them use LLVM, like Xamarin AOT, IL2CPP, Burst.

.NET Core and .NET Framework, do not.

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