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Comment by madez | Hacker News Reader

    Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast,
    prevents nearly all segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.[1]

So, if you care for low memory usage, execution speed or safety guarantees especially for hard-to-debug kind of errors, then Rust might be interesting for you.

It offers low-level access like C or C++ but excels with vastly improved security. So, I'd take that step, and say that where C or C++ is used right now, you might want to use Rust in the future.

[1] http://www.rust-lang.org/

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It's as 'blazingly fast' as Java:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...

or go:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...

Here's what it's not as 'blazingly fast' as:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...

We haven't paid any attention to those benchmarks in a long time. When we did, we even beat C and C++ sometimes.

Are you paying attention to some other benchmarks that you could share when responding to these questions?

Just trying to dismiss measurements that are publically available, without putting forward something you consider better, is kind-of…

No, as optimizing performance hasn't been a focus, shipping good language semantics has been.

Humbly suggest the "optimizing performance hasn't been a focus, shipping good language semantics has been" message needs to be repeated louder and clearer.

The expectation that has been created is - "Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast" - and that may lead to disappointment.

Just because there may have been a regression on a particular benchmark doesn't mean that Rust is not generally fast.

imo it would be helpful to you all, to set a clear expectation that performance will be a priority in some future version but has not been so far. (As that's what you seem to have just said.)

That's all. No reference to "a particular benchmark", or whatever you take "generally fast" to mean.

http://www.areweblazingfastyet.org is free - you'd better grab it before I do :). If you don't take it, I'll just make it return those pieces of the language shootout.

Give it some time to mature. Today is the day of the language specification, not the finalization of the toolchain.

The Rust language offers low-level access with amazing security guarantees, and is working on an optimizing toolchain.

Let me take Python as a comparison. It has fundamental[1] roadblocks for being fast on current and probably future hardware, because its dynamic nature requires many indirections which are problematic for CPU cache efficiency.

Will Rust always be faster than C? Probably not, but that is not needed to be blazingly fast. What is important is that there are no fundamental difficulties to be as fast as C.

[1] I know, you can work around some of those indirections.

> Will Rust always be faster than C?

(By 'always' did you mean 'ever'?)

That may be so, but their advertising gives the wrong impression. They should keep their claims muted until they can back them up.

If you consider that robust and memory efficient parallelization is way more easily achieved in Rust than in C, Rust might already win today for some applications if you limit the developer time. In C it's hard to fulfill the requirements at all.

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