rust showcase

the main program

The main program is a simple API fetcher; it retrieves the list of classes for Spring quarter 2020 from UCSB's curriculumn api and serializes the results to the a file named classes.json in the root director of the project.

setup

You'll need an API key from the UCSB API with the instructions here.

Assuming that is done and you have the rust toolchain installed (instructions here), you can run the project with cargo run.

points of interest

• A performance profile is created throughout the runtime of the program using the flame crate; the profile can be found in flame-graph.html after running the main program at least once.
• The classes can be retrieved in both a single and multi-threaded manner; both are profiled for comparison in the main file.
  • Note: there is a difference in the latency of the first request as compared to all other requests; this is likely a result of the underlying use of TCP, which requires time to "warm up."

examples

There are a few example programs in this repo that are used to illustrate concepts written about in docs. You can get a list of examples to run by running:

cargo run --example

feature documentation

Here is a list of features that we've looked into:

• Shadowing
• Ownership
• Types
• Channels
• Debugging
• Profiling

benchmarking

setup

In order to run the benchmark tests, you'll need to install the rust nightly toolchain.

If you don't already have rustup, the toolchain manager for rust, follow the instructions here.

# Install nightly
rustup toolchain install nightly

You can run the benchmarks with

rustup run nightly cargo bench

setting up benchmarks

• If you want benchmark tests, they are currently a nightly/unstable feature.
• If you want to use an unstable feature, you'll need to declare the flag at the top of the root file in your project (like line 1 of main.rs in this example).
• You then need to stick all of your tests in a module, and flag that for testing with #[cfg(test)].
• Then flag all benchmarks with #[bench].

common benchmark pitfall

The Rust compiler is smart, and sometimes this can work against you if you're attempting to test the performance of something. See this link for details on the common pitfall with regards to benchmarking performance.