Make Rust fast and keep it idiomatic — the "measure first, then make it fast" skill. Profile before optimizing (samply, cargo-flamegraph, perf, Instruments, criterion); cut allocations (clone/to_string/collect, &str vs String, Cow, SmallVec, with_capacity, arenas); zero-cost iterators; SIMD (portable-simd, autovectorization, target-feature); cache-friendly layout (SoA, field order, repr, false sharing); Box<dyn> vs generics and inlining; async perf (spawn_blocking, executor starvation); Arc<Mutex> contention vs channels and sharding; binary size & compile time (LTO, codegen-units, opt-level, strip, cargo-bloat); and idioms (newtype, impl Trait, let-else, matches!, ?-errors). Use when a Rust program is too slow, allocates too much, the binary is too big, compiles too slowly, or a review wants idiomatic + fast code with evidence. NOT for first-time borrow-checker/ownership teaching (use rust-with-claude-code), GPUI/pd-console specifics (use gpui-rust-console), Tauri packaging (rust-app-distribution), or non-Rus
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license
Apache-2.0
name
rust-performance-and-idioms
version
0.1.0
description
Make Rust fast and keep it idiomatic — the "measure first, then make it fast" skill. Profile before optimizing (samply, cargo-flamegraph, perf, Instruments, criterion); cut allocations (clone/to_string/collect, &str vs String, Cow, SmallVec, with_capacity, arenas); zero-cost iterators; SIMD (portable-simd, autovectorization, target-feature); cache-friendly layout (SoA, field order, repr, false sharing); Box<dyn> vs generics and inlining; async perf (spawn_blocking, executor starvation); Arc<Mutex> contention vs channels and sharding; binary size & compile time (LTO, codegen-units, opt-level, strip, cargo-bloat); and idioms (newtype, impl Trait, let-else, matches!, ?-errors). Use when a Rust program is too slow, allocates too much, the binary is too big, compiles too slowly, or a review wants idiomatic + fast code with evidence. NOT for first-time borrow-checker/ownership teaching (use rust-with-claude-code), GPUI/pd-console specifics (use gpui-rust-console), Tauri packaging (rust-app-distribution), or non-Rust profiling.
{"category":"Performance & Systems","argument-hint":"[task: profile|alloc|iterators|simd|layout|async|contention|binary-size|idioms|unsafe]","pairs-with":[{"skill":"rust-with-claude-code","reason":"Generic Rust (borrow checker, async basics, FFI) lives there; this skill assumes you already write compiling Rust"},{"skill":"gpui-rust-console","reason":"The Arc<Mutex>-vs-channels rule here is the"},{"skill":"daemon-development","reason":"Async-executor and contention guidance applies directly to the Port Daddy daemon's hot paths"}]}
rust-performance-and-idioms
The skill for making Rust fast without making it ugly. The thesis, and the
only non-negotiable rule:
Measure first, then make it fast. A profiler tells you which 3% of the
code matters; the other 97% should stay readable. Every tip below is paired
with a when NOT to do it, because the fastest way to ruin a Rust codebase is
to pessimize readability chasing a micro-gain a benchmark never confirmed.
Optimization without a before/after number is a guess wearing a lab coat. This
skill makes you take the measurement first, change one variable, and keep the
change only if Criterion's confidence interval agrees.
When to Use
✅ Use for:
A Rust hot path is too slow and you need to know where and why
Allocation pressure: too many clone/to_string/collect/short-lived Vecs
Deciding &str vs String, Cow, SmallVec, arena, or with_capacity
Iterator-chain vs loop, SIMD (portable-simd / autovectorization), target-feature
Cache-friendly data layout (struct-of-arrays, field ordering, #[repr], false sharing)
Box<dyn Trait> vs generics, where #[inline] actually pays
Async perf: a blocked executor, spawn_blocking, buffering, two-runtime cost
Non-Rust profiling, or "rewrite this Python in Rust" scoping
Decision Points
flowchart TD
S["Rust is too slow / too big"] --> P{Profiled yet?}
P -->|No| PROF["STOP. Profile: samply or cargo-flamegraph;<br/>criterion to baseline the hot fn.<br/>references/01"]
P -->|Yes| W{What does the profile show?}
PROF --> W
W -->|"wide bars in malloc/free,<br/>drop, memcpy"| ALLOC["Cut allocations:<br/>&str/Cow/SmallVec/with_capacity/reuse.<br/>references/02"]
W -->|"hot scalar loop,<br/>data-parallel math"| SIMD["Autovectorize first;<br/>portable-simd if it won't.<br/>references/03"]
W -->|"cache misses,<br/>random memory stalls"| LAYOUT["SoA, field order, repr,<br/>CachePadded for false sharing.<br/>references/02"]
W -->|"executor starved /<br/>tail latency in async"| ASYNC["spawn_blocking, buffer,<br/>don't block between awaits.<br/>references/04"]
W -->|"threads fighting a lock"| LOCK["Mutex contention → channels,<br/>sharding, or atomics.<br/>references/04"]
W -->|"binary huge /<br/>compile slow"| SIZE["LTO, codegen-units=1,<br/>opt-level z, strip, cargo-bloat.<br/>references/03"]
ALLOC --> M{Criterion CI confirms win?}
SIMD --> M
LAYOUT --> M
ASYNC --> M
LOCK --> M
SIZE --> M
M -->|Yes| KEEP["Keep it. Record the number."]
M -->|No / readability lost| REVERT["Revert. The guess was wrong."]
The loop is always the same: profile → hypothesize one cause → change one
thing → re-measure → keep or revert. Skipping the first or last box is how
codebases accumulate ugly code that isn't even faster.
Core Capabilities
Capability
The move
Load
Profile
samply record, cargo flamegraph, perf, Instruments; read the wide bars
references/01-profiling-and-benching.md
Bench
Criterion (CI + regression), #[bench] on nightly, black_box, throughput
When justified, the // SAFETY: invariant doc, Miri-checked
references/05-idioms-cheatsheet.md
Anti-Patterns (Novice vs Expert)
clone()-spam to silence the borrow checker
Novice: "The borrow checker complained, so I added .clone(). It compiles now."
Expert: Each .clone() on String/Vec/HashMap is a heap allocation +
memcpy you may not need. First reach for a borrow (&str, &[T]), then Cow
when ownership is conditional, then restructure so the data has one owner. Clone
deliberately, not reflexively. In the worked example below, deleting one
.collect::<Vec<String>>() and one String-per-word nearly doubled
throughput (1.84 ms → 0.99 ms, measured).
When cloning is correct: small Copy-ish data, or when a borrow would force
a lifetime tangle that costs more readability than the allocation costs cycles.
Detection: grep -n '\.clone()' src/ in hot modules; a flamegraph with fat
malloc/free/drop_in_place bars (references/02).
Premature unsafe for speed
Novice: "Bounds checks are slow, so I'll use get_unchecked everywhere."
Expert: The optimizer elides most bounds checks already when it can prove
the index is in range (iterate, or hoist the check). unsafe buys you a few
percent if a profile proved bounds checks are the bottleneck — and it buys you
UB risk forever. Prefer iterators (no indices to check), then chunks_exact
(the compiler trusts the length), then slicing once up front. Reach for unsafe
last, behind a safe API, with a // SAFETY: comment stating the upheld
invariant, and run it under cargo +nightly miri test.
When unsafe is correct: FFI, a measured hot loop where the bound genuinely
can't be proven, lock-free structures — always Miri-checked.
Detection: unsafe blocks with no // SAFETY: comment; get_unchecked
introduced without a flamegraph showing bounds checks mattered (references/05).
Premature SIMD (hand-written intrinsics first)
Novice: "This loop does math, so I'll hand-write AVX2 intrinsics."
Expert: First make the scalar loop autovectorizable — contiguous slices,
no early exits, a length the compiler can see (chunks_exact), and let LLVM emit
the vectors. Confirm with -C target-cpu=native and a flamegraph/asm check.
Reach for std::simd (portable, nightly) only when autovectorization provably
fails, and remember a binary built for AVX2 won't run on a CPU without it
unless you runtime-dispatch (is_x86_feature_detected!). AVX2 only covers ~75%
of consumer CPUs in the wild.
When explicit SIMD is correct: the autovectorizer can't see the pattern
(shuffles, horizontal reductions, bit manipulation) and the loop is provably hot.
Detection: arch::x86_64::_mm256_* intrinsics with no benchmark; a SIMD path
with no scalar fallback or feature detection (references/03).
Arc<Mutex<T>> as the default sharing primitive
Novice: "Two threads need the data, so Arc<Mutex<T>>."
Expert: A mutex on a hot path serializes your threads and, under contention,
ping-pongs the cache line between cores. Prefer message passing (one owner,
mpsc/crossbeam channels), sharding (N locks over N buckets so threads
rarely collide), RwLock only when reads vastly dominate, or a plain Atomic
for a counter. This is the same bug gpui-rust-console calls its #1
render-loop staller: a producer thread holding a mutex the consumer needs.
When Arc<Mutex> is correct: low-frequency shared config, coarse-grained
state touched rarely, prototypes before you've measured contention.
Detection: a Mutex locked inside a tight loop; perf/Instruments showing
time in __psynch_mutexwait; threads scaling sub-linearly (references/04).
Blocking the async executor
Novice: "It's inside an async fn, so it's async."
Expert: async ≠ non-blocking. A CPU-bound loop, a std::fs read, or a
std::thread::sleep between .awaits parks the whole worker thread and starves
every other task on it — the classic source of latency spikes. Rule of thumb:
no more than ~10–100 µs of work between .await points. Move blocking IO to
spawn_blocking, CPU-bound work to rayon or a bounded spawn_blocking pool
(it can hit ~500 threads — don't flood it with compute), and never call
block_on inside an async task.
When inline work is fine: genuinely tiny synchronous work between awaits.
Detection: std::fs, std::net, reqwest::blocking, or long compute in an
async fn; Tokio's tokio-console showing tasks with long poll times
(references/04).
Guessing release-profile knobs
Novice: "I set opt-level = 3 so it's optimized."
Expert: The defaults leave money on the table. For speed, add lto = "thin"
(often +10–20%) and codegen-units = 1; for size, opt-level = "z",
panic = "abort", strip = true, then use cargo bloat / cargo llvm-lines
to find the generic instantiations bloating you. But these trade compile time
and occasionally hurt speed — so benchmark the binary you actually ship.
When defaults are fine: dev builds, CI where compile time dominates, code
that isn't size- or latency-constrained.
Detection: a [profile.release] with only opt-level set; a CLI binary
shipping 30 MB of un-stripped symbols (references/03).
Quality Gates
□ A profile (samply / cargo-flamegraph) named the hot spot BEFORE any change
□ A criterion baseline exists; every claimed win cites its before/after numbers + CI
□ Optimized code returns identical output to the original (a test asserts it)
□ Each clone/to_string in a hot path is deliberate, not a borrow-checker reflex
□ SIMD paths have a scalar fallback + runtime feature detection (or pinned target-cpu)
□ No Mutex held across an .await; no blocking IO / heavy compute on an async worker
□ Every unsafe block has a // SAFETY: invariant note and passes `cargo +nightly miri test`
□ Release profile knobs (lto/codegen-units/opt-level/strip) chosen by measurement, not cargo-culted
□ Readability was not sacrificed for an unmeasured micro-gain (revert if so)
□ python3 scripts/validate_skill.py → 0 errors
Worked Example: allocation discipline, measured
Full runnable crate in examples/wordcount/ (cargo test --release && cargo bench --bench wordcount). Two word counters return identical counts; only
allocation behavior differs, so the benchmark isolates that one variable.
The smell (naive): for a 50k-token corpus drawn from a 20-word lexicon,
.split_whitespace().map(|w| w.to_string()).collect::<Vec<String>>() heap-
allocates ~50,000 short Strings plus one 50k-element Vec, then keys the map
by owned String.
The fix (disciplined): lowercase once (unchanged — not the variable),
iterate split_whitespace() lazily (no intermediate Vec), and key the map by
&str with a borrowed probe (get_mut then insert only on first sighting), so
only ~20 words ever become owned Strings.
The measurement (rustc 1.94, Apple silicon, opt-level=3 + lto="thin" +
codegen-units=1, Criterion --measurement-time 5):
Benchmark
Median
Throughput
Speedup
naive
1.844 ms
176 MiB/s
baseline
disciplined
0.993 ms
328 MiB/s
1.86× (−46%)
Tight CIs ([1.838, 1.852] vs [0.991, 0.994] ms, p < 0.05): a real win, same
result, no readability lost. When NOT to bother: if this ran once at startup
over 200 bytes, the 0.85 ms saved is invisible and the borrowed-probe is
marginally more code — profile first; this function earned it because it's hot.
Reference Files
File
Consult When
references/01-profiling-and-benching.md
Choosing a profiler (samply/flamegraph/perf/Instruments/DHAT), writing a criterion bench, black_box, reading flamegraphs, statistical honesty
references/02-allocation-and-layout.md
Cutting allocations (&str/Cow/SmallVec/with_capacity/arena), iterator vs loop, SoA, field ordering, #[repr], false sharing
references/03-simd-and-codegen.md
Autovectorization + target-feature/target-cpu, portable-simd, Box<dyn> vs generics, #[inline], LTO/codegen-units/opt-level/strip, cargo-bloat
Self-check: frontmatter, required references/examples exist, no phantom citations
Sources
The references cite primary material: The Rust Performance Book
(nnethercote.github.io/perf-book), the Rust API Guidelines
(rust-lang.github.io/api-guidelines), the Cargo & rustc books, criterion docs,
the portable-simd project, johnthagen/min-sized-rust, Alice Ryhl's async
writing (ryhl.io), crossbeam's CachePadded, and the Miri project. Every
benchmark number in this skill was produced by the runnable crate in
examples/; reproduce before trusting.
