I think I would put the emphasis slightly differently: I don’t feel the confusion is around the word “spawn”, but it spawns futures rather than tasks. For tasks you might indeed expect them to be picked up in the background (which is what work-stealing does), but futures only execute when polled.

I was aware that indeed the trait and lifetime bounds were an artifact of the Tokio work-stealing behavior, but Evan makes a very well-explained case for why we might want to consider stepping away from such behavior as a default in Rust. If anything, it makes me thankful the Rust team is taking a slow-and-steady approach to the whole async thing instead of just making Tokio part of the standard library as some have wished for. Hopefully this gets the consideration it deserves and we all end up with a more ergonomic solution in the end.

I thought we were talking about gamers and Linux users? :p

I have a Framework laptop (Intel GPU) with Arch and KDE, and while I’ve never seen all windows crash when connecting an external monitor, I wouldn’t call it out of the ordinary for one or two to crash after I connect one, especially if I try to drag one to a new position right after.

It’s limited to JS runtimes, but this discussion might be of use: https://github.com/biomejs/biome/discussions/2467 I think you may find Boa fits your criteria, except for the JIT part.

Yeah, sorting is definitely a common use case, but note it also didn’t improve every sorting use case. Anyway, even if I’m a bit skeptical I trust the Rust team that they don’t take these decisions lightly.

But the thing that lead to my original question was: if the compiler itself uses the std sorting internally, there’s also additional reason to hope that it might have transitive performance benefits. So even if compiling the Rust compiler with this PR was actually slower, compiling again with the resulting compiler could be faster since the resulting compiler benefits from faster sorting. So yeah, fingers crossed 🤞

Yeah, it was the first line of the linked PR:

This PR replaces the sort implementations with tailor-made ones that strike a balance of run-time, compile-time and binary-size, yielding run-time and compile-time improvements.

It was also repeated a few paragraphs later that the motivation for the changes was both runtime and compile time improvements. So a little bit bumped to hear the compile time impact wasn’t as good as the authors hoped apparently. I’m not even sure I fully endorse the tradeoff, because it seems the gains, while major, only affect very select use cases, while the regressions seem to affect everyone and hurt in an area that is already perceived as a pain point. But oh well, the total regression is still minor so I guess we’ll live with it.

The post mentioned that the introduction of these new algorithms brings compile-time improvements too, so how should I see this? I assumed it meant that compiling applications that use sorting would speed up, but that seems like a meaningless improvement if overall compilation times have regressed. Or do you mean compiling the compiler has become slower?

Does the Rust compiler use their std sort algorithms, or does it already use specialized ones? If the former, it would be a great side-effect if the compiler itself receives additional speed ups because of this.

From what I understand as I skimmed over the stable sort analysis (https://github.com/Voultapher/sort-research-rs/blob/main/writeup/driftsort_introduction/text.md), it lost out against driftsort.