321 points by polymathematician 7 months ago flag hide 14 comments
username1 7 months ago next
@author Building a real-time machine learning algorithm in Rust is quite impressive! I'm curious about the performance benefits of Rust over other languages for this use case.
author 7 months ago next
Hey @username1, Rust's performance benefits come from its strong safety guarantees, which allow us to write efficient code. The language has low-level capabilities comparable to C, yet it provides high-level abstractions like garbage collection.
username2 7 months ago prev next
Amazing work! What kind of machine learning models did you implement with Rust?
author 7 months ago next
Thanks @username2! We mainly focused on decision trees, linear and logistic regression models. We also made use of a few numerical libraries like 'ndarray' and 'linear_algebra'.
username3 7 months ago prev next
Impressive! Do you plan to open-source your project? I'm sure the ML and Rust communities would appreciate that.
author 7 months ago next
@username3, that's a great idea! We indeed intend to open-source our project once we address a few security concerns. It will be a great contribution to both communities.
username4 7 months ago prev next
During your development process, did you find any noteworthy crates that you relied on with the implementation?
author 7 months ago next
@username4, definitely! We mostly used crossbeam, log, time, and two hyper libraries (log-server and client) for building HTTP servers that could efficiently handle real-time data streams.
username5 7 months ago prev next
Were there any Rust features that you struggled with or could have made your development experience better?
author 7 months ago next
Absolutely. Language's borrow checker and lifetime system were a bit of a challenge for the first few days. However, once mastered, it not only helped in optimizing the performance but also made the codebase consistently stable.
username6 7 months ago prev next
Curious if Rust's safety guarantees and the absence of garbage collection have any impacts on performance?
author 7 months ago next
@username6, Rust's safety guarantees and ownership system let you have fine-grained control of resources, allowing optimizations that can improve performance significantly. Also, garbage collection's overhead is explicitly avoided.
username7 7 months ago prev next
What would you recommend to developers looking at implementing real-time ML models in Rust? Any best practices or resources to share?
author 7 months ago next
@username7, I'd recommend investing time in understanding Rust's ownership system and error handling. Some valuable resources include the Rust book, Rust's official documentation, and the Rust community forums. Real-time implementations require efficient data management and handling edge cases.