We ran a benchmark by loading the entire contents of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle into a String and looking for the word the in the contents. Here are the results of the benchmark on the version of search using the for loop and the version using iterators:

The iterator version was slightly faster! We won’t explain the benchmark code here, because the point is not to prove that the two versions are equivalent but to get a general sense of how these two implementations compare performance-wise.

As another example, the following code is taken from an audio decoder. The decoding algorithm uses the linear prediction mathematical operation to estimate future values based on a linear function of the previous samples. This code uses an iterator chain to do some math on three variables in scope: a buffer slice of data, an array of 12 coefficients, and an amount by which to shift data in . We’ve declared the variables within this example but not given them any values; although this code doesn’t have much meaning outside of its context, it’s still a concise, real-world example of how Rust translates high-level ideas to low-level code.

let buffer: &mut [i32];
let coefficients: [i64; 12];
for i in 12..buffer.len() {
    let prediction = coefficients.iter()
                                 .map(|(&c, &s)| c * s as i64)
    let delta = buffer[i];
}

Calculations in applications like audio decoders often prioritize performance most highly. Here, we’re creating an iterator, using two adaptors, and then consuming the value. What assembly code would this Rust code compile to? Well, as of this writing, it compiles down to the same assembly you’d write by hand. There’s no loop at all corresponding to the iteration over the values in : Rust knows that there are 12 iterations, so it “unrolls” the loop. Unrolling is an optimization that removes the overhead of the loop controlling code and instead generates repetitive code for each iteration of the loop.

All of the coefficients get stored in registers, which means accessing the values is very fast. There are no bounds checks on the array access at runtime. All these optimizations that Rust is able to apply make the resulting code extremely efficient. Now that you know this, you can use iterators and closures without fear! They make code seem like it’s higher level but don’t impose a runtime performance penalty for doing so.

Summary

Now that we’ve improved the expressiveness of our I/O project, let’s look at some more features of cargo that will help us share the project with the world.