What are zero-cost abstractions and why do they matter? ⚡
When a programming language, like Rust, provides zero-cost abstraction it simply means that high-level constructs (classes, wrapper functions, iterators, type templates, etc) will not incur any runtime overhead as compared to its low-level implementation.
For example, the following code that uses the “sum” function on an iterator will not be slower than writing an explicit loop over the vector.
fn main() {
let numbers = vec![1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
let sum: i32 = numbers.iter().sum();
println!("Sum: {}", sum);
}Despite the higher-level abstraction, the compiler and standard library implementation are designed to optimize the code, so the performance of this approach is always comparable to the low-level alternative.
So, no matter how you write your code, no matter how much of high-level abstractions you use, the execution will remain as performant as possible.
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