LDN Talks January, 2020
- He is a drummer and home practice is what motivated him to build an acoustic environment
- App is designed to assist acousticians when designing environments such as home cinemas
- It calculates the acoustic absorption curve of a variety of absorption devices mounted against a rigid backing such as a brick wall
- This is a Rust-WASM project which is a port of an Excel sheet he wrote about 15 years ago using VBScript!
- This was his first Rust WASM project and due to that it took about three months for this project.
- Maths for acoustic calculations were not new to him and they were basically ports from Excel to Rust.
- If done again, he mentioned that he would be able to do the project in a couple of weeks now.
- Some design decisions, such as using JavaScript for event handling could be revisited if reimplemented from scratch.
- Since WASM allows capturing the DOM at the start, even handling can be done completely within Rust-WASM.
- For some functions he is passing simply
JSObjects, which can stand for anything - this is something he found that he preferred from experience given that obscure error messages one gets if type conversions fail w.r.t. more specific parameters.
- Andrius Aucinas is a performance researcher at Brave and was previously the Head of Engineering at HAT (Hub of All Things), which he co-founded.
- He is part of the team responsible for porting Brave Browser's AdBlock engine over from C++ to Rust, he'll be sharing some insights and experiences of that development process.
- Pointers from the talk
- Used Apple Instruments for profiling
- Algorithmic improvements were far more important than the optimisation potential of Rust vs C++
- Blocking alogorithm is now close to uBlock's implementation
- Brave does uBlock like filtering but also some fingerprinting protectoin which uBlock cannot do since it is not as integrated to the core
- Brave and other vendors fund the Easylist maintainer which is an open source collaborative effort
- Thanks to really optimised libraries (which does use
unsafefor performance reasons) this new code did not have to useunsafe- Rust unsafe code can be disabled by setting following macro - https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/safe-unsafe-meaning.html,#![forbid(unsafe_code)]
- One of the surprising speedups was using ASCII for string processing, instead of UTF when it was possible to. This is something I have also observed even in Java code. It is a known optimisation in InternetDomainName, for example, to use Ascii internally, when possible.
- Even though not used by this specific code, SMID optimisations used by the libraries make a huge difference.
Last modified 3yr ago