Debunking "Faster than Rust": Malicious Benchmarks in Tov

Tov is a new programming language marketed to be "[a] programming language for coding agents. It reads like TypeScript and builds native binaries that beat Rust's."Benchmarks in their Git repository show that they perform better than Rust, in some cases over 10× better. However, they also briefly mentioned the internals of Tov:Tov is a compiler. It checks the TypeScript your agent wrote, writes it out as C and hands that to clang, so what you ship is one native binary with nothing to install next to it.A sane engineer would immediately doubt the correctness of their benchmarks. Rust has pretty much the same performance as C, and if Tov transpiles to C, saying Tov beats Rust is mostly equivalent to saying C beats C. That's contradiction right there. Let's ignore the stats for axum, maybe tokio has some overhead, like maybe; but clearly there's no way you get 1.6× faster than Rust in strings. You have to be lying. That's what a sane engineer would normally think.In this blog post, we check 3 of their "inflated" benchmarks: bigint_fib, dispatch, and map_insert. We show that these benchmarks are maliciously crafted to slow Rust down. We have also benchmarked the improved Rust programs with their Tov programs to show that Rust has equivalent or better performance than Tov.Set-upscargo build --release was used to compile the Rust programs, and tov build (which defaults to -O3) was used to compile the Tov programs. Here are our setups:"ram-buffet"root@8b4fcd497f61

OS: Ultramarine Linux 44 (Container Image) x86_64 Host: PowerEdge R640 Kernel: Linux 7.0.0-31-generic Uptime: 36 days, 20 hours, 43 mins Packages: 1046 (rpm) Shell: bash 5.3.9 Display (VGA-1): 1024x768 [External] Cursor: Adwaita Terminal: /dev/pts/2 CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8251C (48) @ 4.20 GHz GPU: Matrox Electronics Systems Ltd. Integrated Matrox G200eW3 Graphics Controller Memory: 22.03 GiB / 247.25 GiB (9%) Swap: Disabled Disk (/): 3.62 TiB / 6.98 TiB (52%) - overlay Local IP (eth0): [redacted] Locale: C"nukobook"mado@nukobook

OS: Ultramarine Linux 44 (Plasma Edition) x86_64 Host: Vivobook_ASUSLaptop K5404VA_K5404VA (1.0) Kernel: Linux 7.2.9-cachyos1.fc44.x86_64 Uptime: 3 days, 22 hours, 18 mins Packages: 14 (flatpak), 5804 (rpm) Shell: zsh 5.9 Display (SDC416D): 2880x1800 in 14", 60 Hz [Built-in] Desktop Environment: KDE Plasma 6.7.5 Window Manager: KWin (Wayland) WM Theme: Klassy Theme: Klassy (Dark) [Qt], Materia-dark [GTK2/3/4] Icons: breeze-dark [Qt], …