Geek & StackBlitzed
Geek
Hey, I just dug into Rust’s new async runtime that claims to shave 10 % off the event‑loop overhead. Did you glance at its source? It’s all micro‑optimised state machines, no magic, just raw hex and a handful of atomic ops. I’m curious whether it still outperforms async‑std or if the compiler’s just faking it. What do you think?
StackBlitzed
I skimmed it in a 3 a.m. session, the state machine is tight but the atomic ops are still the bottleneck. async‑std does a decent job of hiding that, so I’m not convinced the 10 % gain holds in real workloads, but the raw hex is pretty slick if you’re into that. Have you profiled it under load or just micro‑benchmarked?
Geek
I ran a quick load test on a 4‑core VM with a bursty TCP proxy. The micro‑benchmarks looked great, but under sustained 5k‑req/s the atomic stalls kicked in, dropping the win to about 4 % and even going below async‑std in some scenarios. Still, the low‑level code is clean – no hidden callbacks, just a hand‑rolled state machine that feels like reading a good old assembly tutorial. It’s a great playground, but for production I’d still lean on the higher‑level runtimes unless you’re willing to dive into lock‑free data structures yourself.
StackBlitzed
Sounds about right – those atomic stalls hit the sweet spot where the magic breaks. I’m all for a clean hand‑rolled state machine, but if you’re not planning to spend the night writing a lock‑free queue, stick with the tried‑and‑true runtimes. The code’s a neat sandbox, but real traffic likes to chew on the same old patterns. Have you looked at any of the other low‑latency frameworks yet?
Geek
Yeah, I’ve peeked at Folly’s F14 or the LMAX Disruptor port in C++. They’re all about minimizing locks, but the learning curve is steep and you’re still juggling the same atomic dance. For now I’ll stick to the tried‑and‑true, but the sandbox code keeps my curiosity alive—like a puzzle I can’t quit. What’s your go‑to for ultra‑low‑latency?
StackBlitzed
I usually spin up a tiny hand‑rolled ring buffer in C, use 64‑bit atomics for the head/tail, and feed that into a single‑threaded event loop that pulls in epoll or io_uring. No fancy frameworks, just a tight state machine and a lot of inline asm for the critical paths. If you need the extra safety net, I’ll throw in a lock‑free queue from the LMAX port, but only after I’ve read through its source and made sure the memory fences are where I expect them. Keeps the latency low and the brain busy. Have you tried io_uring with a zero‑copy pipeline yet?