Implementation in C, Fortran, Go and Rust of a very simple N-Body simulator with 3 particles using a LeapFrog integrator. Presented in What can the programming language Rust do for astrophysics?, to appear in the Proceedings of the IAU Symposium 325 on Astroinformatics.
The code has evolved since publication, implementing several suggestion made by the Hacker News and Rust subreddit communities. The current times on a 1,6 GHz Intel Core i5 machine:
- C: 2m53.504s
- Fortran: 2m29.226s
- Rust: 2m33.082s
- Go: 3m22.032s
Output positions for the two particles after a one million year simulation:
[
[0.00011259641961937496, 0.00011235312238407964, 0.00000982962683070781],
[-2.986377308237493, 14588403.613911422, 1276320.0322206458]
]
The original article's conclusions are still valid for this simple user case, Rust can be as fast and precise as C or Fortran. Additionally, Rust characteristics ensures that scientific results are not affected by memory management issues and this is a great advantage for reliable scientific computation.
From each directory:
make clean
make
time target/optimized/leapfrog