Is using same modules in different files efficient? - rust

Let's say I have two files:
file1.rs
file2.rs
In file1.rs I use module:
use abc;
Similarly in file2.rs I use module:
use abc;
Is it memory efficient or time efficient to do that? Or should I merge code of file2.rs into file1.rs? to save import time/memory? I want to follow above approach to make my code more readable and manageable.

I think you misunderstand. Rust isn't an interpreted language. It is a compiled language.
That means, there is absolutely zero overhead in importing as many things as you want. It will slow down the compiler that creates your program (although even that will only get noticable if you import hundrets of things). But your final executable has no notion of .rs files any more, it's all a big bunch of binary, optimized processor instructions.
You can use a file 1000 times in different modules, it will most likely still result in only one single instance in the final executable. (or multiple, in the case of generics, but the amount of use statements still doesn't matter)
To demonstrate: You can compile your program and then delete all the source files. It will still run.

Related

How to restore an accidentally overwritten source file using the object file

By mistake, I erased contents of my Fortran source file with a command involving ">":
some command > file.f
I do not use version control or anything. However, there is an object file present, file.o, if that may be of any help.
Is there a chance to restore the contents of file.f?
There may be decompiler tools that can produce Fortran source code from compiled object code, but it's not the original source code: things like comments and local variable names are discarded during the compilation process and are not present in the object file, so they can't be recovered. The structure of the decompiled code is likely to be different as well, especially if the object file was compiled with optimization.
You're not going to get your original code back from an object file, unfortunately.
Decompilation will work fine with bytecode languages like Java which are more or less "designed for that purpose".
With an optimizing compiler, such as Fortran (or C, or C++) you are pretty much out of luck.
Tools exist that restore some kind of source file (such as "boomerang"), but it will be nowhere near the original, and usually it is a waste of time even trying.
Given the nature of the compilation process, it is often not even possible to reverse the operation. Not only is information such as variable names or the names of non-exported functions (and of course comments) discarded and constants are replaced with magic numbers, but also the compiled program may have an entirely different structure than the code that you have written.
Compilers regularly perform optimizations like moving invariants out of loops, rearranging statements, or eleminating common subexpressions (even when optimizations are not explicitly enabled, most compilers do trivial optimizations anyway).
A compiler is required to produce something that behaves "as if" as observed from the outside, but not something that is necessarily equivalent to the source code that you have written.
A similar phenomenon exists when stepping through a program in a debugger. Sometimes, variables cannot be watched, or you cannot break on a particular line, and entire statements will apparently just be "gone" much to the surprise of the unaware developer because the compiler optimized them out.
In summary, the single best advice that I can give, unhelpful as it may be, is to acknowledge that you have done something stupid, rewrite the source file from scratch, and start using a version control system now.

Size of fay generated file

I tried fay-jquery and the included sample test.hs file results in whooping 150 kb of js file.
Even with closure compiling it is still 20 kb.
I understand that it must carry a runtime, stdlib and jquery wrappers with it.
I can tell fay not to generate stdlib (--no-stdlib and --no-builtins flags).
But i do not know how to tell it not to include jquery code.
So my question is, how can i split those static parts into a separate js file and only generate module specific code?
This way large parts of code will be loaded only once (and cached) and i can create many smaller js files for separate web pages.
Yes it's safe to split modules up, as of Fay 0.16 all modules can exist standalone (before that you could still have the runtime and fay-base separate). There are some flags for this, --print-runtime and --no-stdlib. Compile with optimizations (-O, this increases the output size, but closure will be able to minimize it even better).
Also remember that the web server should gzip this. That brings the code size down to 4.5kiB. That's pretty decent, right?
You might want to consider putting all of your javascript in one file, that means a slower initial load but then users will have it cached for future page loads.
The reason the file size is so big is that fay-jquery has a lot of FFI bindings which produce a lot of transcoding information. I think fay-jquery could be optimized a lot here to for instance use Ptr JQuery rather than just JQuery in the types, or by figuring out that a lot of this is unnecessary while compiling, or abstracting the conversions more in the compiler's output.
Another possible issue I realized a couple of days ago is that the output is now in the global scope rather than in a closure, which might mean that google closure can't remove redundant code as well as previously (haven't had time to investigate this yet). The modules generation should perhaps be changed to produce a closure for each module.
Also see Reducing output size on the wiki.

Haskell: unnecessary binary growth with module imports

When i import a (big) module into a Main module in one of the following ways:
import Mymodule
import qualified Mymodule as M
import Mymodule (MyDatatype)
the compiled binary grows the same huge amount compared to when i don't import that module. This happens regardless of whether i use anything inside that module or not in the Main module. Shouldn't the compiler (i am using GHC on Debian Testing) only add into the binary what is needed to run it?
In my specific case i have a huge Map in Mymodule which i don't use in the Main module. Selectively importing what i really need, did not change the growth of the compiled binary.
As far as GHC is concerned, import lists are only there for readability and avoiding name clashes; they don't affect what's linked in at all.
Also, even if you did only import a few functions from a library, they might still depend on the bulk of the library internally, so you shouldn't necessarily expect to see a size decrease from only using some of an available interface in general.
By default, GHC links in entire libraries, rather than only the pieces you use; you could avoid this by building libraries with the -split-objs option to GHC (or put split-objs: True in your cabal-install configuration file (~/.cabal/config on Unix)), but it slows down compilation, and is seemingly not recommended by the GHC developers:
-split-objs
Tell the linker to split the single object file that would normally be generated into multiple object files, one per top-level Haskell function or type in the module. This only makes sense for libraries, where it means that executables linked against the library are smaller as they only link against the object files that they need. However, assembling all the sections separately is expensive, so this is slower than compiling normally. Additionally, the size of the library itself (the .a file) can be a factor of 2 to 2.5 larger. We use this feature for building GHC’s libraries.
— The GHC manual
This will omit unused parts of libraries you use, regardless of what you import.
You might also be interested in using shared Haskell libraries.

Is there a way to convert from a string to pure code in C++?

I know that its possible to read from a .txt file and then convert various parts of that into string, char, and int values, but is it possible to take a string and use it as real code in the program?
Code:
string codeblock1="cout<<This is a test;";
string codeblock2="int array[5]={0,6,6,3,5};}";
int i;
cin>>i;
if(i)
{
execute(codeblock1);
}
else
{
execute(codeblock2);
}
Where execute is a function that converts from text to actual code (I don't know if there actually is a function called execute, I'm using it for the purpose of my example).
In C++ there's no simple way to do this. This feature is available in higher-level languages like Python, Lisp, Ruby and Perl (usually with some variation of an eval function). However, even in these languages this practice is frowned upon, because it can result in very unreadable code.
It's important you ask yourself (and perhaps tell us) why you want to do it?
Or do you only want to know if it's possible? If so, it is, though in a hairy way. You can write a C++ source file (generate whatever you want into it, as long as it's valid C++), then compile it and link to your code. All of this can be done automatically, of course, as long as a compiler is available to you in runtime (and you just execute it with system). I know someone who did this for some heavy optimization once. It's not pretty, but can be made to work.
You can create a function and parse whatever strings you like and create a data structure from it. This is known as a parse tree. Subsequently you can examine your parse tree and generate the necessary dynamic structures to perform the logic therin. The parse tree is subsequently converted into a runtime representation that is executed.
All compilers do exactly this. They take your code and they produce machine code based on this. In your particular case you want a language to write code for itself. Normally this is done in the context of a code generator and it is part of a larger build process. If you write a program to parse your language (consider flex and bison for this operation) that generates code you can achieve the results you desire.
Many scripting languages offer this sort of feature, going all the way back to eval in LISP - but C and C++ don't expose the compiler at runtime.
There's nothing in the spec that stops you from creating and executing some arbitrary machine language, like so:
char code[] = { 0x2f, 0x3c, 0x17, 0x43 }; // some machine code of some sort
typedef void (FuncType*)(); // define a function pointer type
FuncType func = (FuncType)code; // take the address of the code
func(); // and jump to it!
but most environments will crash if you try this, for security reasons. (Many viruses work by convincing ordinary programs to do something like this.)
In a normal environment, one thing you could do is create a complete program as text, then invoke the compiler to compile it and invoke the resulting executable.
If you want to run code in your own memory space, you could invoke the compiler to build you a DLL (or .so, depending on your platform) and then link in the DLL and jump into it.
First, I wanted to say, that I never implemented something like that myself and I may be way off, however, did you try CodeDomProvider class in System.CodeDom.Compiler namespace? I have a feeling the classes in System.CodeDom can provide you with the functionality you are looking for.
Of course, it will all be .NET code, not any other platform
Go here for sample
Yes, you just have to build a compiler (and possibly a linker) and you're there.
Several languages such as Python can be embedded into C/C++ so that may be an option.
It's kind of sort of possible, but not with just straight C/C++. You'll need some layer underneath such as LLVM.
Check out c-repl and ccons
One way that you could do this is with Boost Python. You wouldn't be using C++ at that point, but it's a good way of allowing the user to use a scripting language to interact with the existing program. I know it's not exactly what you want, but perhaps it might help.
Sounds like you're trying to create "C++Script", which doesn't exist as far as I know. C++ is a compiled language. This means it always must be compiled to native bytecode before being executed. You could wrap the code as a function, run it through a compiler, then execute the resulting DLL dynamically, but you're not going to get access to anything a compiled DLL wouldn't normally get.
You'd be better off trying to do this in Java, JavaScript, VBScript, or .NET, which are at one stage or another interpreted languages. Most of these languages either have an eval or execute function for just that, or can just be included as text.
Of course executing blocks of code isn't the safest idea - it will leave you vulnerable to all kinds of data execution attacks.
My recommendation would be to create a scripting language that serves the purposes of your application. This would give the user a limited set of instructions for security reasons, and allow you to interact with the existing program much more dynamically than a compiled external block.
Not easily, because C++ is a compiled language. Several people have pointed round-about ways to make it work - either execute the compiler, or incorporate a compiler or interpreter into your program. If you want to go the interpreter route, you can save yourself a lot of work by using an existing open source project, such as Lua

Bytecode Vs. Interpreted

I remember a professor once saying that interpreted code was about 10 times slower than compiled. What's the speed difference between interpreted and bytecode? (assuming that the bytecode isn't JIT compiled)
I ask because some folks have been kicking around the idea of compiling vim script into bytecode and I just wonder what kind of performance boost that will get.
When you compile things down to bytecode, you have the opportunity to first perform a bunch of expensive high-level optimizations. You design the byte-code to be very easily compiled to machine code and run all the optimizations and flow analysis ahead of time.
The speed-increase is thus potentially quite substantial - not only do you skip the whole lexing/parsing stages at runtime, but you also have more opportunity to apply optimizations and generate better machine code.
You could see a pretty good boost. However, there are a lot of factors. You can't just say that compiled code is always about 10 times faster than interpreted code, or that bytecode is n times faster than interpreted code.
Factors include the complexity and verbosity of the language for example. If a keyword in the language is several characters, and the bytecode is one, it should be quite a bit faster to load the bytecode, and jump to the routine that handles that bytecode, than it is to read the keyword string, then figure out where to go. But, if you're interpreting one of the exotic languages that has a one-byte keyword, the difference might be less noticeable.
I've seen this performance boost in practice, so it might worth it for you. Besides, it's fun to write such a thing, gives you a feel for how language interpreters and compilers work, and that will make you a better coder.
Are there actually any mainstream "interpreters" these days that don't actually compile their code? (Either to bytecode or something similar.)
For instance, when you use use a Perl program directly from its source code, the first thing it does is compile the source into a syntax tree, which it then optimizes and uses to execute the program. In normal situations the time spent compiling is tiny compared to the time actually running the program.
Sticking to this example, obviously Perl cannot be faster than well-optimized C code, as it is written in C. In practice, for most things you would normally do with Perl (like text processing), it will be as fast as you could reasonably code it in C, and orders of magnitude easier to write. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't try to write a high performance math routine directly in Perl.
Also, a lot of "classic" interpreters also include the lex/parse phase along with execution.
For example, consider executing a Python script. When you do that, you have all the costs associated with converting the program text in to the internal interpreter data structures, which are then executed.
Now contrast that with executing a compiled Python script, a .pyc file. Here, the lex and parse phase is done, and you have just the runtime of the inner interpreter.
But if you consider, say, a classic BASIC interpreter, these typically never store the raw text, rather they store a tokenized form and recreate the program text when you do "LIST". Here the byte code is much cruder (you don't really have a virtual machine here), but your execution gets to skip some of the text processing. That's all done when you enter the line and hit ENTER.
It is according to your virtual machine. Some of your faster virtual machines(JVM) are approaching the speed of C code. So how fast is your interpreted code running compared to C?
Don't think that if you convert your interpreted code into ByteCode it will run as fast a Java(near C speeds), there has been years of performance boosting going on, but you should see significant speed boost.
Emacs has been ported into bytecode with increased performance. Might be worth a look to you.
I've never noticed a Vim script that was slow enough to notice. Assuming a script primarily calls built-in, native-code, operations (regexes, block operations, etc) that are implemented in the editor's core, even a 10x speed-up of the 'glue logic' in scripting would be insignificant.
Still, profiling is the only way to be really sure.

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