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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I'm just reporting from the trenches here. I think you are suggesting that everyone is aware of and capable of using state-of-the-art (from 20 years ago) tracing schemes like XRay[1], when in reality they are not. Most projects would be well-served by any basic profiler but even profiling is apparently for wizards, because I've seen a lot of projects that will resort to manually annotating functions with OTel trace spans, which are ~millions of times more expensive than function calls. Even eBPF uprobe/uretprobe is 100x more expensive than XRay, at a minimum. HotSpot's JFR is like a miracle compared to what people suffer through to diagnose Rust+Tokio.

1: https://llvm.org/docs/XRay.html ... is there even a Rust analog to this?

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Not even an analog: https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/unstable-book/compiler-flags/...

It's worth pointing out though that just tracing function calls isn't good enough for the kinds of stackless coroutines that run in async Rust tasks. You need a way of mapping between the async tasks and the compiler emitted traces.

afaik, C/C++ have the same problem.

The difference is nobody in the C++ community believes that a dominant asynchronous executor library exists, and there is not a pervasive belief that it would be helpful.

The "C++ community", if it even exists, barely believes in sharing code let alone any library being "dominant." They'd have to agree on a build system first, after all.

But honestly that's a mischaracterization of the situation in Rust. Tokio is popular for networked service backends. If that's the wheelhouse you're in then yea it might look "dominant."

You don't need a build system to share code.

You can share with header files and respective (shared) object files regardless of the build system you're using. Likewise you could just share the source. None of this needs a build system.

I was just being a bit sardonic because the C++ ecosystem is so fragmented that something like tokio couldn't really exist. It would be one of three executors in boost, abseil, or folly, and you would never see the kind of downstream ecosystem build on top of them because C++ shops are allergic to external dependencies.

Any organisation that cares about security should be allergic to external dependencies, that is why companies like Nexus and JFrog exist, with companies paying to keep internal repos infrastructure in shape.

One just doesn't install willy nilly from the Internet into the CI/CD pipeline.

Well, they do, and then spend a few late nights when there is a bunch of CVE to fix.

Using an artifactory instance as the origin is not functionally different from installing something 'willy nilly' from the internet. It addresses a narrow range of threats while predominantly being more reliable and faster than public repositories.

It doesn't fix the actual problems with C++, which is that it's significantly more difficult to get and use external dependencies because of the compilation and linkage model of C++ libraries.

If C++ were as easy to build and link as modern programming languages you'd see the same kinds of tools as cargo, and the same kinds of ecosystem evolution as rust, like tokio. But you don't, because C++ code sucks to build, package, distribute, update, and reuse.

(I'm aware/have used conan/meson/vcpkg/etc - doesn't change my opinion).

It surely does, because in most companies that care about security it isn't a mirror, rather the only third party packages that developers are allowed to use beyond the standard library.

Additionally, making new packages available for consumption requires approval from IT and possibly legal, before they become available for consumption.

What is hard is people educated in scripting languages not wanting to learn about toolchains.

The moment Rust depends on other programming languages, we get a build.rs spaghetti file, depending on the knowledge of those writing it, or people throwing away Cargo altogether, and replacing it with Bazel, buck2 and co.

Of course we do, it is done via OS package managers, commercial libraries and SDKs.

More recently, via vcpkg and conan.

Huh, it seems xray puts blank trampolines all over your binary? That sounds pretty nifty but I would expect it to be pretty language agnostic, ish? Adding support should be doable for Rust as well, right? Anyways, pretty nifty.

I am by no means an expert, but I've recently improved performance for some code and used tracy. They have rust bindings as well. It's pretty cool and it seems to be low overhead. Wonder if I can couple it with something like xray? Tracy is more the tracing library + tracing interpretations/aquisition tool.

Edit: apparently rust already supports xray natively on the nightly.

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