I never did Rails but I used Ruby for many personal projects in the 2000s.

When showing stuff to my coworkers or friends, I often joked how I tried to make my code look like it was already gzipped.

That’s a whole different thing to me. That’s not async, that’s channels and multithreading.

I do that in Rust as well with mcsp channels and it’s been fine.

It’s the async/await bit that I find incredibly akward all the time.

Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t async programming a mess in all programming languages?

The original post made a valid point. This one makes a point as well, but representing it as “128x faster than C” is plain clickbait.

It’s not comparing the same type of program. If it used intrinsics in C (they exist, it’s where most other languages leverage their intrinsic support from), or even turned on GCC or LLVM auto vectorization to compare performance, I’d be willing to let it go, but right now it’s just misrepresenting reality in that title.

We don’t need this kind of hyperbole or clickbait. We’re better than that as a community. I don’t mean this as “article bad! author bad!”, this article is useful, but it would be much better of titled something like “Speeding up string search 128x by using SIMD intrinsics in Rust”, which gets the point across and the 128x number would still attract enough attention, but for the right reasons.

The title is extremely misleading. They’re comparing a Rust program using SIMD intrinsics to a Rust program which doesn’t, without even using auto vectorization to let the driver look for SIMD opportunities.

This is a good example of why SIMD is useful and how fast it can be, but it is not an example of how Rust is faster than C or how humans are smarter than compilers. It doesn’t even have a C reference source to compare to at all.