dylanmc

dylanmc

Rust Brain Teasers: "Stacking Boxes" heap vs. stack performance explanation

Title: Rust Brain Teasers, page 47

“Because of the extra steps required for heap read/write access—particularly with frequent allocations—accessing data on the heap can be a lot slower than accessing data on the stack. Why? Because the CPU’s memory cache will try its best to keep your heap data available.”

This explanation doesn’t really make sense - both heap and stack are cached, and in both cases “the memory cache will try its best”. I think this might be trying to say something about stack memory has better locality, so the cache has an easier job, but even so, the above paragraph struck me as misleading and/or confusing.

Marked As Solved

herbert

herbert

Author of Hands-on Rust

Thank you! I’m inclined to agree, I’ll see if I can make that explanation a bit clearer for the next beta.

There’s really two things at play with stack vs. heap cache. One is locality: your stack is almost always in one of the cache levels because your program uses it constantly. The stack being tiny also helps with this: it’s easy to fit into the cache, so there’s an even higher probability that it will be there (and if it isn’t, it’s a fast operation to load a tiny stack frame into cache vs. an arbitrarily sized heap object).

Good catch - thank you. :slight_smile:

Also Liked

dylanmc

dylanmc

Yay - glad to help! While I’m here, I think the previous paragraph is also confusing:

“Reading data from the heap also requires a little more work: to read data, your program first needs to read the pointer to determine where the heap data is stored. Once it knows the location, the program can read the data from there.”

It’s confusing (to me) - accessing the stack is also via a pointer, and usually accessing the stack involves computing an offset from the stack pointer first, so…it’s not cut-and-dried easier.

One aspect of the difference between them that your discussion doesn’t yet capture is that allocating from the stack is super-cheap (moving the SP), where it’s almost rocket science what goes on in modern heap allocators.

I’m really enjoying the book so far - I’ve learned a lot already!

Where Next?

Popular Pragmatic Bookshelf topics Top

AleksandrKudashkin
On the page xv there is an instruction to run bin/setup from the main folder. I downloaded the source code today (12/03/21) and can’t see...
New
patoncrispy
I’m new to Rust and am using this book to learn more as well as to feed my interest in game dev. I’ve just finished the flappy dragon exa...
New
digitalbias
Title: Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves: Problem connecting to Postgres with Grafana on (page 64) If you follow the defau...
New
s2k
Hi all, currently I wonder how the Tailwind colours work (or don’t work). For example, in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb I have...
New
kolossal
Hi, I need some help, I’m new to rust and was learning through your book. but I got stuck at the last stage of distribution. Whenever I t...
New
rainforest
Hi, I’ve got a question about the implementation of PubSub when using a Phoenix.Socket.Transport behaviour rather than channels. Before ...
New
Henrai
Hi, I’m working on the Chapter 8 of the book. After I add add the point_offset, I’m still able to see acne: In the image above, I re...
New
New
dachristenson
I just bought this book to learn about Android development, and I’m already running into a major issue in Ch. 1, p. 20: “Update activity...
New
dachristenson
I’ve got to the end of Ch. 11, and the app runs, with all tabs displaying what they should – at first. After switching around between St...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Tailwind CSS is an exciting new CSS framework that allows you to design your site by composing simple utility classes to create complex e...
New
Exadra37
I am asking for any distro that only has the bare-bones to be able to get a shell in the server and then just install the packages as we ...
New
Exadra37
Oh just spent so much time on this to discover now that RancherOS is in end of life but Rancher is refusing to mark the Github repo as su...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Create efficient, elegant software tests in pytest, Python's most powerful testing framework. Brian Okken @brianokken Edited by Kat...
New
AstonJ
Biggest jackpot ever apparently! :upside_down_face: I don’t (usually) gamble/play the lottery, but working on a program to predict the...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build efficient applications that exploit the unique benefits of a pure functional language, learning from an engineer who uses Haskell t...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: VM Brasseur @vmbrasseur We have a treat for you today! We turn the spotlight onto Open Source as we sit down with V...
New
New
NewsBot
Node.js v22.14.0 has been released. Link: Release 2025-02-11, Version 22.14.0 'Jod' (LTS), @aduh95 · nodejs/node · GitHub
New

Sub Categories: