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

brianokken
Many tasks_proj/tests directories exist in chapters 2, 3, 5 that have tests that use the custom markers smoke and get, which are not decl...
New
jesse050717
Title: Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition, pg 116 Hi - I just started chapter 5 and I am stuck on page 116 while trying to star...
New
jeremyhuiskamp
Title: Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition, vB17.0 (p9) The create table guestbook syntax suggested doesn’t seem to be accepted ...
New
jskubick
I’m running Android Studio “Arctic Fox” 2020.3.1 Patch 2, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I only made it to page 8 before running into ...
New
jskubick
I’m under the impression that when the reader gets to page 136 (“View Data with the Database Inspector”), the code SHOULD be able to buil...
New
brunogirin
When trying to run tox in parallel as explained on page 151, I got the following error: tox: error: argument -p/–parallel: expected one...
New
brunogirin
When running tox for the first time, I got the following error: ERROR: InterpreterNotFound: python3.10 I realised that I was running ...
New
hazardco
On page 78 the following code appears: <%= link_to ‘Destroy’, product, class: ‘hover:underline’, method: :delete, data: { confirm...
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
rainforest
Hi, I’ve got a question about the implementation of PubSub when using a Phoenix.Socket.Transport behaviour rather than channels. Before ...
New

Other popular topics Top

dimitarvp
Small essay with thoughts on macOS vs. Linux: I know @Exadra37 is just waiting around the corner to scream at me “I TOLD YOU SO!!!” but I...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1147 29994 760
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Create efficient, elegant software tests in pytest, Python's most powerful testing framework. Brian Okken @brianokken Edited by Kat...
New
AstonJ
We’ve talked about his book briefly here but it is quickly becoming obsolete - so he’s decided to create a series of 7 podcasts, the firs...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Mike Riley @mriley This month, we turn the spotlight on Mike Riley, author of Portable Python Projects. Mike’s book ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Rebecca Skinner @RebeccaSkinner Welcome to our latest author spotlight, where we sit down with Rebecca Skinner, auth...
New
CommunityNews
A Brief Review of the Minisforum V3 AMD Tablet. Update: I have created an awesome-minisforum-v3 GitHub repository to list information fo...
New
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New
AstonJ
This is a very quick guide, you just need to: Download LM Studio: https://lmstudio.ai/ Click on search Type DeepSeek, then select the o...
New

Sub Categories: