My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021)
Manuel Cerón details creating an interpreter with Rust, transitioning from Clojure. Leveraging Rust's safety features, he faced challenges with closures and classes, optimizing code for performance while balancing safety.
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Manuel Cerón shares his journey of creating an interpreter with Rust, inspired by the book "Crafting Interpreters" by Bob Nystrom. He initially implemented a tree-walking interpreter in Clojure and then transitioned to Rust for a bytecode VM. Embracing Rust's safety features, he leveraged the standard library and advanced type system, finding joy in writing the compiler but facing challenges with advanced concepts like closures and classes due to Rust's strict rules. Developing a garbage collector in safe Rust posed difficulties, leading to a simple design using trait objects and tombstones. Despite initial hopes of matching the speed of a C implementation, performance testing revealed significant slowdowns, prompting Manuel to optimize his code by introducing unsafe blocks. Profiling identified issues with the garbage collector implementation and pointer dereferencing, highlighting areas for improvement to enhance performance. Manuel's experience showcases the balance between Rust's safety features and performance optimization in interpreter development.
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4 commentsThe result shows that a direct solution (in less time than the C solution might have taken?) was not achieved, which can be attributed to inexperience. Then he got the safe version running, but with a big performance penalty. In a third stage, the code got more and more "unsafe" and performance rose close to the C implementation - without ever reaching it.
Some results from this - very well described - experiment is:
- Rust is a good language, but in development: the Rust developers still have a lot of work to do.
- IMHO, the safe version here is at the sweet spot; stop optimizing there with all the unsafe tricks (playing with the hash map is still fair game) and leave the rest to the compiler writers. Once they have put the amount of effort in that has gone into compiling Java, the graphs will look different. Safety is priceless, and who knows what buffer weaknesses clox has that can be exploited.
The post's writing is very clear, and I'm particularly grateful for the explanation of the problem the borrow checker has with GC in the main loop, and I can see how a lot of re-factoring solves one type issue in one corner only for it to crop up in another - thanks!
I gotta say its not selling me on rust if bypassing the borrow checker with my own allocations still results in having to jump through so many hoops and struggle against the language.
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