Patrick Walton

@pcwalton

Research engineer at Mozilla

San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2009

Tweets

You blocked @pcwalton

Are you sure you want to view these Tweets? Viewing Tweets won't unblock @pcwalton

  1. 17 hours ago

    (2) There’s no high-profile language design decision you can point to and say “aha, that was a mistake!” No header files, for example. The slowness comes from a lot of smaller things that have real benefits, such as the borrow check.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  2. 17 hours ago

    Rust compiler performance is hard to have meaningful discussions about because: (1) There’s no single part of the compiler which is slow. In fact the compiler is pretty well optimized.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  3. Jan 31

    Been pleasantly surprised at the amount of demand there is for fast vector graphics rendering in the browser. Time to get it done :)

    Undo
  4. Jan 30

    For those asking for Swift witness tables/intensional type analysis: Rust used to have those, and generating all the virtual copy/get-align/etc functions for every type took like 30% of the compilation time as I recall. Monomorphization was a compilation time *win*.

    Undo
  5. Retweeted
    Jan 30
    Replying to

    Maybe the real problem is that generics are actually bad

    Undo
  6. Jan 30

    Random thought: It sure is nice that we went with typed generics in Rust instead of untyped templates like C++/D/Nim/etc, so that we can even *have* the monomorphization debate at all.

    Undo
  7. Jan 30

    *I'm* actually OK with this as an opt-in compilation mode, at least for cold functions. But are the people complaining about compilation time OK with it?

    Show this thread
    Undo
  8. Jan 30

    I'm increasingly convinced that the interpreter solution is the only reasonable alternative for Rust.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  9. Jan 30

    Easy to say "monomorphization is awful and Rust should never have done it", harder to say "I want all generic functions to be compiled to bytecode and to embed a Rust interpreter in every binary".

    Show this thread
    Undo
  10. Jan 28

    Maybe "rewrite it in Rust" is annoying, but from my point of view "Rust doesn't prevent every bug ever, so you should just use C or C++" is much more annoying.

    Undo
  11. Retweeted
    Jan 28

    At the very last minute, the Halo Wars 1 (Xbox 360) developers changed the custom std::vector container equivalent (likely used in thousands of places in the code) to do range checking on *all* operator[]'s. This shipped.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  12. Jan 28
    Show this thread
    Undo
  13. Jan 28

    Huge thanks to s3bk for porting Pathfinder to Web Assembly!

    Show this thread
    Undo
  14. Jan 27

    The trick, of course, is to do this without slowing down development. It's tough, but I think it's doable.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  15. Jan 27

    IMO, modularity should be a goal of every browser engine. You should be able to share code between browsers, and between browsers and other types of apps, without taking the entire engine as a monolith.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  16. Jan 27

    To a first approximation, in 2020 image codecs would parse and entropy decode in Rust, throw the resulting bits on GPU, and do everything else there.

    Undo
  17. Jan 27

    We need Rust image codecs to be used everywhere, like, yesterday.

    Undo
  18. Jan 24

    For those who aren’t graphics programmers, this is like if instead of creating two functions mkdir() and rmdir(), Unix decided to just have mkdir(), but to have a function you could call beforehand to make mkdir() actually delete directories instead

    Show this thread
    Undo
  19. Jan 24

    curses: functional reactive programming before it was cool

    Show this thread
    Undo
  20. Jan 24

    TIL (h/t ): React’s vDOM is pretty much the same thing curses(3) was in 1980. Only difference is that React is on the Web.

    Show this thread
    Undo

Loading seems to be taking a while.

Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

    You may also like

    ·