Yet another Hacker News

61 points woodruffw 3 days ago 8 comments

Sharlin 1 hour ago | parent

I’m fairly convinced that Debug should never be inlined. Display probably neither, the fmt machinery is heavy enough that not inlining is probably not a bottleneck even in serialization-heavy workloads. I’ve had to #[inline(never)] some of my own Debug/Display impls, shrinking the binary by tens of kilobytes (out of a few hundred, so relatively a significant reduction).

aw1621107 1 hour ago | parent

For what it's worth, according to the PR that added the annotation [0] doing so generally resulted in decreases in compile times and binary sizes on benchmarks. Furthermore, an additional experiment that avoided emitting the inline attribute on structs with >5 fields resulted in benchmark regressions compared to always emitting the attribute [1]. I'd guess this is one of those things which may help in aggregate but hurts for specific cases.

That being said, one of the Rust devs indicated in the corresponding lobste.rs discussion [2] that they're open to revisiting/rebalancing things if they get enough bug reports indicating something is up, so it might not hurt to tag onto the bug report the author will (hopefully) eventually submit.

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/117727

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/118031

[2]: https://lobste.rs/s/dldhpw/rust_s_derive_often_implies_inlin...

Sharlin 1 hour ago | parent

Thanks, interesting!

afdbcreid 47 minutes ago | parent

A reasonable conjecture was raised on lobsters that this is because `#[inline]` makes actual codegen (LLVM IR and down from MIR) lazy, and most `Debug` impls are never used.

zamazan4ik 1 hour ago | parent

Or just try to avoid all of these optimization guesses by using Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO), that inserts/deletes all inlines based on actual application runtime profile.

woodruffw 55 minutes ago | parent

The codebase in question (uv) uses PGO already. I suspect there isn’t a general way to guarantee that PGO ensures that only the “right” things get inlined.

vlovich123 47 minutes ago | parent

I feel like Debug should be lazily emitted altogether when it’s first used - just a special marker that’s never expanded since 99% of the Debug implementations aren’t used and having the rest marked #[cold] as inline is obviously wrong. Of course implementing it in practice sounds exceptionally difficult.

That being said, even the justifying performance improvement PR was itself a mix of improvements and regressions

api 34 minutes ago | parent

There's a joke that the LLVM heuristic for whether to inline a function is "return true;" LLVM tends to inline aggressively.

You can control this behavior with opt level "s" or "z" or "#[inline(never)]", but be aware that too little inlining can have large negative performance impacts.

It's hard to get inlining exactly right without profile guided optimization.