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Rust-Written Zlib-rs Is Not Only Safer But Now Outperforming Zlib C Implementations
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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Phoronix comments really are a battlefield for rust vs C. The seaheads just can't accept rust is safer and will moan about the borrow checker telling them they are doing something unsafe. Probably the same people would argue static typing is better then dynamic typing, but can't seem to see the parallels between safety guarantees at compilation time vs checking at runtime. Impressive.
More to zlib-rs: good job! RiR without bothering people is great. Just do it.
Anti Commercial-AI license
There has been a zlib in Ada for many years, doing its job quietly. Speed comparable to the C version, probably not beating it, but not trailing by much in any case. Rust is safer than C but less safe than Ada from what I can tell.
Rust (edited for clarity) looks to me to be about halfway between C and C++ in complexity, with a bunch of footguns removed, and using implicit move semantics ("borrowing") more than C++ does, and the notorious borrow checker is simply the compiler making sure you don't make RAII mistakes because of that.
It's always seemed to me that Phoronix is too often about turning mailing list drama into clickbait. I've mostly disliked it, because of that.
I am struggling to understand why you are getting downvoted.
I don't downvote people, but since you asked.
Who asked?
There is no one C version. The version being referred to is the original zlib, which happens to be the worst implementation of four possible zlib back-ends available in the
flate2crate. Besides the originalzlibandzlib-rs, there is zlib-ng andcloudflare_zlib, both of which are also (still) implemented in C.So being comparable to the original zlib is hardly something to shout about. In fact, individual hobbyists have been beating that implementation just for fun for many years.
That's a lot of inaccurate waffling that could have been entirely written by an LLM, except it's probably too wrong for it to have been done so.
I appreciate the reply