Today, let’s run some benchmark and compare performance of the same program written in C++ vs Rust vs Go. We try our best to isolate noise from factors other than the difference in languages. As with any benchmark, however, the result is to be taken with grain of salt — no single benchmark can truly compare the performance of two different languages.
Program
The program we will compare is gunzip that decompresses .gz files. There are different implementations of gunzip, such as GNU gzip written in C, zlib written in C, miniz written in C, flate2-rs written in Rust and gzip in Go.
However, we can’t accurately benchmark two languages unless one is a direct port of another, as this introduces noise from possibly different implementations.
For that reason, we will choose the following three
- gunzip written in
Rust - cpp_gunzip, a direct port of above written in
C++ - go_gunzip, a direct port of above written in
Go
Minimizing noise
There is still one issue — use of external library. They rely on a third-party library for computing CRC32 checksum, which takes significant time within decompression. In particular, gunzip relies on crc32fast crate, cpp_gunzip can link against either zlib or FastCrc32, and go_gunzip relies on Go standard crc32 library. Luckily, all of them support a multi-thread option that runs CRC32 checksum on a separate thread…
