M O R D I A D I

One of my goals this year is to learn new things that take more than a few weeks to learn. I've been learning Rust. One of the claims I saw is that Rust's borrow mechanics allow it to optimize better than C++ does. I wanted to see this in action so I ran some simple examples through godbolt. Here's some C++ code that reads from array A and writes to array B:

int test(const int* A, int* B, int i) {     int x = A[i];     B[i] = x+1;     int y = A[i];     return x+y; } 

This C++ code compiles to assembly, with -O2:

movsx   rdx, edx lea     rcx, [rdi+rdx*4] mov     eax, DWORD PTR [rcx] lea     edi, [rax+1] mov     DWORD PTR [rsi+rdx*4], edi add     eax, DWORD PTR [rcx] ret 

Note that it is loading DWORD PTR [rcx] twice and loading DWORD PTR [rsi+…] once. That means it's accessing A[i]'s memory twice and B[i] once. It knows that A hasn't changed and it knows i hasn't changed but it doesn't know that A[i] hasn't changed. It's possible that A and B overlap. That means it has to load A[i] twice, even though it's marked const.

Here's the Rust version:

pub fn test(A: &[i32], B: &mut [i32], i: usize) -> i32 {     let x = A[i];     B[i] = x+1;     let y = A[i];     return x+y; } 

and the output (some parts omitted):

push    rax mov     eax, DWORD PTR [rdi + 4*r8] … lea     ecx, [rax + 1] mov     DWORD PTR [rdx + 4*r8], ecx add     eax, eax pop     rcx ret 

This code has only two DWORD PTR accesses. It knows that A is a shared reference (so there are no other writers), and B is a mutable reference (so there are no other readers). That means it can conclude that A and B can't overlap. Once it's read A[i] from memory it doesn't have to read it again. Cool!

C (but not C++) has the restrict keyword for this. You can tell the C compiler "trust me, these don't overlap", but C doesn't check. Rust checks this at compile time.

So far I'm enjoying learning Rust. It has many of the things I wanted in a language since the mid-1990s. I don't know if I'll actually use it for a real project, but that's not my goal right now. My goal is to learn some new things that challenge my brain, and Rust is doing that for me.