nannou-org/nannou

Improving iterative compile times for projects depending on nannou

Open

#387 opened on Aug 18, 2019

View on GitHub
 (4 comments) (0 reactions) (0 assignees)Rust (4,662 stars) (254 forks)batch import
good first issueuser experience

Description

Slightly related to #178 but more focused on iterative compile times than fresh ones.

Currently it's easy to reach fairly significant compile times even for small projects (e.g. 10+ secs). I think there's likely a lot we could do to improve this situation with the design of nannou itself.

Here are some steps I think we could take:

  • First, setup a reliable iterative compilation time bench-marking process. This should have some way of measuring iterative re-compile times for many different size projects including both examples and more significant downstream projects like spatial_audio_server. Just getting a setup working for examples would be a good start. I believe rustc provides a way to get a breakdown of exactly where the compiler is spending most of its time, though I don't remember how to do this off the top of my head.
  • Survey the surface-level of nannou's API. Attempt to remove generic types in favour of dynamic dispatch where possible. This should be more than doable in many of the top-level APIs without any significant performance penalty.
  • Encourage code generation during library compile-time where possible. E.g. perhaps providing type and function wrappers around generic types and functions with their type parameters filled using the default type will assist the compiler to pre-generate a lot of code for the common use case?

Any other ideas are welcome!

I've labelled this as good-first-issue as this might be a nice way to become familiar with a lot of nannou's internals and rust benchmarking tools.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
rust
Domain
performancedeveloper experience
Issue type
performance
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
over 1 week
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
mostly clear
Prerequisites
Basic RustUnderstanding of compilationFamiliarity with nannou API
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
50
Research direction
Start by setting up a benchmarking process to measure iterative compile times for nannou examples and downstream projects like spatial audio server. Use rustc timing tools (e.g., Zself profile) to identify bottlenecks. Then, survey nannou's API (especially in crates like nannou::app) to find generic types that can be replaced with dynamic dispatch. Consider code generation for default type parameters. See prior discussion in issue #178.