Show HN: Chili. Rust port of Spice, a low-overhead parallelization library
(github.com)190 points by dragostis 11 hours ago
190 points by dragostis 11 hours ago
Check out my high-overhead replacement for 'cat' in BASH
~ $ type cat
cat is a function
cat ()
{
while read; do
printf '%s\n' "$REPLY";
done < "$@"
}
It probably butchers things. Why? I got bored in a meeting and someone accidentally posted 'cat' to TeamsStop publishing software, you don't refine your meal constantly. Enough is enough
That’s what I was wondering. Iiuc openmp uses work stealing and the spice readme talks about the inefficiency of that:
https://github.com/judofyr/spice?tab=readme-ov-file#work-ste...
so I’d be interested in seeing a benchmark.
Well, for one thing OpenMP is a c/c++ library, and chili and rayon are rust libraries.
It's probably possible to use openmp from rust, but the interface probably isn't as nice, you would need some kind of translation layer from rust closures and iterators to the OpenMP API
This previous discussion of Spice on HN may help a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230344
The README of Spice has detailed explanation of the approach: https://github.com/judofyr/spice
The company I work at (Hadean) used to have this as a product - think erlang-like multi machine IPC, with automatic acquisition of cloud resources and language integration for Rust, C, C++, Python. Pretty easy to point it at some machines and get them running a distributed application (as in simulation or big data).
But infrastructure for developers is hard to make money with - developers like to build it themselves and people holding the purse strings point at kubernetes and say "that's free". So we just use it as an internal platform for a distributed simulation engine and it works pretty well.
I did an analysis of removing it (it's a lot of bespoke code that we have to maintain for something that isn't our actual product) and I think you could probably implement something on top of Nomad that's close enough...but then Nomad went BSL and Kubernetes is a big complexity shift.
So...if anyone knows of something out there let me know, I'd love to be able to use it outside of work :)
Right, because Anyscale found a niche that distributed compute matters in (AI) and built great libraries/hosted platforms/services around that. I would venture that the money they make from people who pare back things to just ray core is ~0, which is why it's open source.
Put another way - building such a platform doesn't preclude commercial success, but (at least for us) it isn't sufficient. Fly.io might be able to pull it off if they want to explore that direction imo.
Fwiw if you dig around in the ray core codebase (as I did when I was doing competitor analysis years ago) you can use the core C code from other languages to build such a platform for Rust if you like - they had Java and C++ interfaces at the time, but I haven't looked in the last 5 years.
The old EE in me got excited for a second there, thinking someone had made a Rust port of [SPICE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE).
Not related to the content, but as a port of "spice" -- being from New Mexico, we would usually refer to a spicy pepper as (eg green) "chile," or a chunky dish with beans and meat as (eg Texas) "chili." Looks like the AP Stylebook agrees, though Webster's makes it seem less clear, so you can probably get away with it either way.
Further abroad (Australia), Chile is a country and chili is the hot pepper, so I suspect the (English) language here is highly regional.
Eg I’ve even lived in North American and never come across that spelling for the pepper.
Oddly I associate `chile` with the pepper and `chili` with the stew. Curiously chili pepper seems to be the common spelling around where I live so I have no clue where I picked this up.
Yeah, I've lived in the northeast US my whole life and have never seen "Chile" used for anything but the country before; the pepper and the food are both spelled "chili" in my experience. That being said, pronouncing the country's name as a homophone of "chili" is a bit of an anglicism too, since from what I remember of Spanish in high school, the more accurate pronunciation would be something like "chee-lay" rather than "chill-ee". I wouldn't be shocked if both the spelling "chili" and the pronunciation of it had roots in the name of the country and in English usage drifted over time (sort of like the pronunciation of the name of the city "Amarillo" in Texas).
Was just arguing with a friend the other day about distinction between a "chili" and what New Mexican's have in "green chile stew." I have had what by at least strong family-resemblance is a chili but had essentially an adovada meat base, but would never call something chili that had potatoes or any visible vegetables. But in NM, even frito pies get the (superior) "green chile stew" topping.
The definitive source on how to spell "chili":
I love this, the overhead of rayon always made it hard to gauge whether to use it for small operations (or could be small operations). This seems to solve that, at least for relatively short workloads