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Experimenting with Rust in Chromium

chromium.googlesource.com

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Re: Experimenting with Rust in Chromium

#11

Post by steveklabnik »

cletus wrote: post #10
riwsky wrote: post #7

Even though it'd be a while before this really affects the Chrome codebase, it's a real testament to how well Rust nails the safe-but-low-level niche. Google does not lack resources to tool (or staff!) a C++ codebase correctly, nor does it lack resources to build languages[1] targeting these specific problems; that they'd consider Rust isn't just because "it's there". [1] https://github.com/google/wuffs

Story time. I worked at Google years ago and there was a presentation once done on some optimizations done on Chrome performance. This is probably 10 years ago now. So C++ has std::string of course. C libraries however use "const char ", which has lots of problems. The C++ designers allowed you to avoid friction here by allowing you to pass a std::string to a function expending a const char . Technically, this is an…

HN comments on this story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704318

Re: Experimenting with Rust in Chromium

#12

Post by fractalb »

cletus wrote: post #10
riwsky wrote: post #7

Even though it'd be a while before this really affects the Chrome codebase, it's a real testament to how well Rust nails the safe-but-low-level niche. Google does not lack resources to tool (or staff!) a C++ codebase correctly, nor does it lack resources to build languages[1] targeting these specific problems; that they'd consider Rust isn't just because "it's there". [1] https://github.com/google/wuffs

Story time. I worked at Google years ago and there was a presentation once done on some optimizations done on Chrome performance. This is probably 10 years ago now. So C++ has std::string of course. C libraries however use "const char ", which has lots of problems. The C++ designers allowed you to avoid friction here by allowing you to pass a std::string to a function expending a const char . Technically, this is an…

If all the dependent C libraries are replaced with C++ versions, then the no.of translations will become zero?

Re: Experimenting with Rust in Chromium

#14

Post by woodruffw »

fractalb wrote: post #12
cletus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story time. I worked at Google years ago and there was a presentation once done on some optimizations done on Chrome performance. This is probably 10 years ago now. So C++ has std::string of course. C libraries however use "const char ", which has lots of problems. The C++ designers allowed you to avoid friction here by allowing you to pass a std::string to a function expending a const char . Technically, this is an…

If all the dependent C libraries are replaced with C++ versions, then the no.of translations will become zero?

Nominally, yes. But conversions between C strings and `std::string` are just a small corner of the problem: C++ makes it very easy to accidentally call copying constructors and perform nontrivial copies when doing e.g. implicit argument conversion.

Re: Experimenting with Rust in Chromium

#15

Post by Gigachad »

riwsky wrote: post #7

Even though it'd be a while before this really affects the Chrome codebase, it's a real testament to how well Rust nails the safe-but-low-level niche. Google does not lack resources to tool (or staff!) a C++ codebase correctly, nor does it lack resources to build languages[1] targeting these specific problems; that they'd consider Rust isn't just because "it's there". [1] https://github.com/google/wuffs

For me, the fact that the Linux project has decided that Rust will be included in the kernel was the point Rust has become a success. It's pretty clear at this point that Rust will be around for decades and start to replace the well established C space.

Re: Experimenting with Rust in Chromium

#16

Post by imron »

cletus wrote: post #10
riwsky wrote: post #7

Even though it'd be a while before this really affects the Chrome codebase, it's a real testament to how well Rust nails the safe-but-low-level niche. Google does not lack resources to tool (or staff!) a C++ codebase correctly, nor does it lack resources to build languages[1] targeting these specific problems; that they'd consider Rust isn't just because "it's there". [1] https://github.com/google/wuffs

Story time. I worked at Google years ago and there was a presentation once done on some optimizations done on Chrome performance. This is probably 10 years ago now. So C++ has std::string of course. C libraries however use "const char ", which has lots of problems. The C++ designers allowed you to avoid friction here by allowing you to pass a std::string to a function expending a const char . Technically, this is an…

> The C++ designers allowed you to avoid friction here by allowing you to pass a std::string to a function expending a const char . Technically, this is an operator method.

It's the other way round. You can pass a const char* to a function expecting a std::string. Passing a std::string to a function expecting const char* will generate a compile error.

You need to call c_str() on the std::string if you want to pass it as a parameter to a function expecting a const char*.

Re: Experimenting with Rust in Chromium

#17

Post by bluejekyll »

> Rust is not yet available on all Chromium platforms (just Linux and Android for now)

The beginning of this sentence didn’t surprise me, but the fact that it’s just Linux and Android did. Rust supports macOS and Windows really well, so I wonder what the gap is here?

> Facilities and tooling in Rust are not as rich as other languages yet.

Is this meant in the context of Chromium?

Re: Experimenting with Rust in Chromium

#18

Post by mseepgood »

cletus wrote: post #10
riwsky wrote: post #7

Even though it'd be a while before this really affects the Chrome codebase, it's a real testament to how well Rust nails the safe-but-low-level niche. Google does not lack resources to tool (or staff!) a C++ codebase correctly, nor does it lack resources to build languages[1] targeting these specific problems; that they'd consider Rust isn't just because "it's there". [1] https://github.com/google/wuffs

Story time. I worked at Google years ago and there was a presentation once done on some optimizations done on Chrome performance. This is probably 10 years ago now. So C++ has std::string of course. C libraries however use "const char ", which has lots of problems. The C++ designers allowed you to avoid friction here by allowing you to pass a std::string to a function expending a const char . Technically, this is an…

How would Rust help here? Isn't it famous for having too many string types?

Re: Experimenting with Rust in Chromium

#19

Post by zaarn »

fractalb wrote: post #12
cletus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story time. I worked at Google years ago and there was a presentation once done on some optimizations done on Chrome performance. This is probably 10 years ago now. So C++ has std::string of course. C libraries however use "const char ", which has lots of problems. The C++ designers allowed you to avoid friction here by allowing you to pass a std::string to a function expending a const char . Technically, this is an…

If all the dependent C libraries are replaced with C++ versions, then the no.of translations will become zero?

Conversions that create copies are always explicit in Rust (unless it's a copy type, which strings aren't). Conversion between the string types is at minimum taking the borrow of it and then taking a copy of the borrow is once again explicit. You can also cheaply use a CoW wrapper to get a no-copy string passed around into plenty of places.

The point is, with rust you have more options to enforce no-copy through the type system.

Re: Experimenting with Rust in Chromium

#20

Post by _nalply »

mseepgood wrote: post #18
cletus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story time. I worked at Google years ago and there was a presentation once done on some optimizations done on Chrome performance. This is probably 10 years ago now. So C++ has std::string of course. C libraries however use "const char ", which has lots of problems. The C++ designers allowed you to avoid friction here by allowing you to pass a std::string to a function expending a const char . Technically, this is an…

How would Rust help here? Isn't it famous for having too many string types?

It's a complicated but well-thought out system which tends to avoid copies by making them explicit in the source code and preferring taking references or slices which are cheap operations.

The string slice for example is an Unicode-capable view into bytes of the string (immutably pre-compiled static bytes in the binary, bytes of fixed length on the stack or heap-allocated). The aliasing rules are enforced by the compiler, so it is safe to throw around pointers and sizes and not to worry about buffer overflows, as long as it compiles.

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