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Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

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Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#81

Post by bad_user »

johnfn wrote: post #30

I tried Rust about a month ago. The language itself is amazing, the pattern matching is super expressive, the borrow checker is incredible in the kinds of errors it can pick up on, and rust-analyzer is leagues beyond where RLS was. But... the compile times are an absolute non-starter for me. I'm the kind of guy that likes to re-run his code continually to see if it validates to what I expect it to be doing. In Rust,…

In dynamic languages like JavaScript or Python it's necessary to continually run your code in order to validate that the API (of the standard library or of dependencies) was used correctly, that the types match, etc.

Rerunning your code continually is no longer necessary in a language like Rust, because the compiler already does that for you.

People complaining about slow compile times in static languages like Rust, Haskell, Scala miss the forest from the trees, which is that the compiler eliminates entire bug categories, logic you'd otherwise need to check at runtime, either via unit tests or at least by running the code locally. Compiler times can always be better, but the compiler works as a theorem prover and the slowness is entirely justified, overall yielding a better ROI.

N.B. I'm not saying that with Rust you don't need to run your code or have unit tests. There's only so much a compiler can prove. But you no longer need to do it as often.

You can't switch to a language like Rust and expect Python and if you do, then the experience is going to be horrible, because Rust is a very different language.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#82

Post by teraku »

johnfn wrote: post #46
felipellrocha wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man... I hear you, but this is only a problem compiling from a cold cache. From a warm cache, it really isn't a problem anymore.

No, it's an issue for warm caches as well. I had a 10 second compilation cycle to add a comment to a file in a project with a couple hundred lines of code and like 4 lines in my cargo.toml. 10 seconds! For a few hundred lines! Maybe that doesn't sound insane, but extrapolating out, that's at least 100x worse than the languages that I'm used to. (I know that compilation speed is a Hard Problem, I know that I'm compari…

What? I have a ~1k LOC program which consists of 4 modules, 3 of them all importing the 4th and in total ~200 dependencies. With a warm cache my program takes ~2s to compile. Cold-cache is about 18s

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#83

Post by IshKebab »

rwmj wrote: post #78

Why wouldn't you want a garbage collected language for developing web services? Developer time is at a premium, lots of RAM, likely a single environment managing multiple requests so the GC gets a global overview, and because of network variability you're unlikely to be doing anything with realtime constraints.

GC pauses in some languages are not good (Go put a lot of effort into fixing this). That's about it, but Rust is good for reasons other than its lack of GC. The type system is very robust, which means fewer runtime errors. The standard library is pretty great, even if parts of it are third party de facto standards (serde, crossbeam, etc.). It's much more expressive than Go. Much faster than Python.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#84

Post by echelon »

I've built a few web services in Rust, and I've been incredibly pleased by the existing ecosystem as well as how easy it is to develop concurrent solutions for CPU-intensive tasks.

https://vo.codes is a text to speech service written in Rust and it performs really well. Any service failures are simply my poor proxy implementation - the core TTS service itself scales very predictably.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#85

Post by Radim »

byteofbits wrote: post #39
johnfn wrote: post #30

I tried Rust about a month ago. The language itself is amazing, the pattern matching is super expressive, the borrow checker is incredible in the kinds of errors it can pick up on, and rust-analyzer is leagues beyond where RLS was. But... the compile times are an absolute non-starter for me. I'm the kind of guy that likes to re-run his code continually to see if it validates to what I expect it to be doing. In Rust,…

As a datapoint for your hypothesis, when working in a typed language I will build my code only a few times a day. I much prefer working from a logical and thoughtful approach rather than iteration. At the point where I start a build I am already reasonably confident that it will do what I want it to. There are some bugs where I will need to re-build several times consecutively but these are relatively rare for me (I…

As one more datapoint, I do this (=barely ever "compile" / run) even in dynamically typed languages. My primary is Python.

Definitely a leftover from when I was a kid, in the early 90s, without ready access to computers. I remember lying at a hospital bed and filling pages and pages with C64 programs, using pen and paper.

This kinda forced me into the paradigm of "think through invariants and structure first". To this day, typing code out on a computer (incl. compilation) is almost mechanical, not a vital part of the design process.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#86

Post by vaylian »

byteofbits wrote: post #39
johnfn wrote: post #30

I tried Rust about a month ago. The language itself is amazing, the pattern matching is super expressive, the borrow checker is incredible in the kinds of errors it can pick up on, and rust-analyzer is leagues beyond where RLS was. But... the compile times are an absolute non-starter for me. I'm the kind of guy that likes to re-run his code continually to see if it validates to what I expect it to be doing. In Rust,…

As a datapoint for your hypothesis, when working in a typed language I will build my code only a few times a day. I much prefer working from a logical and thoughtful approach rather than iteration. At the point where I start a build I am already reasonably confident that it will do what I want it to. There are some bugs where I will need to re-build several times consecutively but these are relatively rare for me (I…

+1 for that data point. The type system allows me to be much more explicit with regard to what I expect my code to do. And Rust-analyzer helps me spot those parts that don't fit together. But I typically turn it off, until I am actually done with defining all data types.

I also use assertions and unit tests, because the type system still has its limitations (or some things would be too awkward to express), but I can move forward a long way without actually compiling a project.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#87

Post by smt88 »

johnfn wrote: post #75
_-___________-_ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main thing that I use compiling for is to validate little off-by-one things. Like, is substring() exclusive on the second parameter? What about range syntax and the slice operator? What if I wrote + 1 instead of - 1 somewhere, or did I'm a really big fan of reading the docs (or, where the docs are insufficient, the source), and will always have docs.rs open alongside my editor. While the examples you provide ar…

Perhaps my examples were a little too trivial. I do a decent amount of game/graphics coding, so there's a lot of "hmm, does this look good 20 pixels over? How about 18?" and I don't know how you'd get around that without recompiling. (OK, you could read preferences from a file, but then you'd have to optimistically write every value you'd ever want to recompile to a file. I've tried this, but it's far too much overhe…

> I do a decent amount of game/graphics coding, so there's a lot of "hmm, does this look good 20 pixels over? How about 18?" and I don't know how you'd get around that without recompiling.

I know exactly what you mean. Front-end development can be this way, too.

I think it's OK (and probably true) to say that you shouldn't use Rust for cases like this right now.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#88

Post by Nican »

seer wrote: post #57
Nican wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come from a C# background, but to list out a few hurdles that I have already deal with with TypeScript/NodeJs. 1. C#'s AsyncLocal has made a few things simpler to trace SQL queries to a request. 2. We chose to use hapi.js some 2 years ago, because we found the interface superior to Express, but I did not expect the sole developer of hapi.js to decide stop working on the project [1], and left my head scratching on w…

I can feel the pain on all 5 points. One thing I did notice though is that NodeJS has such a huge breadth of packages that its _very_ hard to actually pick something good. But there is almost always an alternative that's maybe not as popular, but is a lot more "solid" alternative. For example we used SOHU-Co/kafka-node for a while as a kafka client, until we hit some bugs that made us dig through its internals and we…

I will have to take a look Slonik.

I feel like I have been to hell and back with ORMs, between Sequelize, Entity Framework, Hibernate, SQLAlchemy, etc.. and frankly, I think they just cause more headaches than solve problems.

I would love to have strongly typed SQL queries, but I have found that Dapper [1] fills a special place in my heart.

[1] https://github.com/StackExchange/Dapper

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#89

Post by philosopher1234 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #20
Nican wrote: post #7

There is an advocate on our team that wants to migrate our web service from Nodejs to Rust. While I am not a huge fan of Typescript, at least libraries are readily available and generally easy to use. On the other hand, being able to show that we are able to do monitoring, user auditing, ORM, opentracing, gRPC-web with Rust is non trivial. Now that I think of it, being able to do a "hello world" on any language is pr…

Rewriting is very expensive, and the advocate will need to make a VERY strong case for Rust if they're asking your company to invest in replacing it - and alternatives have to be suggested as well, including other languages and a good list of things wrong with Node / TS. Consider developer availability as well. I don't think a strong enough argument can be made. I'm sure you CAN write web services in Rust, and that i…

What do you miss about java?

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#90

Post by estsauver »

johnfn wrote: post #48
wiz21c wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> in a normal day I'd probably average hundreds to a thousand compilation cycles! Maybe it's time to switch to an interpreter ? :-)

You mean a REPL, or an interpreted language? I'd love a REPL that could somehow load the state of my entire app so I could test stuff out, but I've never found a language that could do that and also had reasonable type safety guarantees.

Some of the best solutions to that world right now seem to be things like lisps with dynamic typing added. You get a great set of repl support, but you can also build components and systems into easy wrapper scripts to load them as needed.
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