Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help • Hacker News Board

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#41

Post by g4nt1 » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

johnnycerberus wrote: post #27

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friends of mine that are contract programmers have been ramping on Rust for the past 2-3 years claiming the number of requests for it has been increasing exponentially. I installed it two weeks ago and have been getting a feel for it. It's like if C++, C#, and npm had an offspring. I always hoped Java would make a comeback, but Rust is looking like the real deal.

Applications of Java and Rust do not overlap. As a big data engineer, Rust does not provide any advantage to me. Good luck rewritting all the big data tools from Java (Elasticsearch, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Neo4j, Deeplearning4j, Cassandra, Solr, Arrow, OrientDB) and all the scientific stuff from C++ (Eigen, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Jax, Halide, OpenCV and the multitude of resources for CUDA and OpenCL) and databases (MySQ…

In my opinion data processing / ML / database development is one of the best use case for rust. You want stable memory management and performance . This is still something than often times is done in C/C++. There are several promising technologies being developer in rust in that space; tikv (key-value store), materialize (steaming DB), arrow/parquet has a rust implementation, Toshi (Elasticsearch), Tantivy (Lucene), etc

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#42

Post by johnnycerberus » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

coddle-hark wrote: post #34

johnnycerberus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applications of Java and Rust do not overlap. As a big data engineer, Rust does not provide any advantage to me. Good luck rewritting all the big data tools from Java (Elasticsearch, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Neo4j, Deeplearning4j, Cassandra, Solr, Arrow, OrientDB) and all the scientific stuff from C++ (Eigen, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Jax, Halide, OpenCV and the multitude of resources for CUDA and OpenCL) and databases (MySQ…

With this logic there should be no new programming languages ever until there’s a paradigm shift in computing.

> I always hoped Java would make a comeback, but Rust is looking like the real deal.

I was mainly responding to this statement which came across quite aggressive. Java and C++ do not need comebacks and my comment was intended to be a wake-up call to reality. Yes, it is great to learn Rust on the side, but advocating something to be used everywhere is another story.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#43

Post by ufmace » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

If they really want to help, the most obvious first step would seem to be to formally adopt and throw some full-time resources at the Rusoto AWS library set for Rust. It's pretty usable right now, but would certainly benefit from the level of testing, helper methods, and language-specific additions that the officially supported AWS libs have.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#44

Post by johnnycerberus » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #36

johnnycerberus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applications of Java and Rust do not overlap. As a big data engineer, Rust does not provide any advantage to me. Good luck rewritting all the big data tools from Java (Elasticsearch, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Neo4j, Deeplearning4j, Cassandra, Solr, Arrow, OrientDB) and all the scientific stuff from C++ (Eigen, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Jax, Halide, OpenCV and the multitude of resources for CUDA and OpenCL) and databases (MySQ…

Why do you need to rewrite them? Rust can call C++ code, just like Java and Python can. (I note you list Python libraries like Tensorflow and PyTorch as C++, which is accurate because they're written in C++, but they're certainly heavily used from a non-C++ language.)

It was more of a proof of what you can build with Java and C++, the infrastructure that provides Python users with capabilities.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#45

Post by stagger87 » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

johnnycerberus wrote: post #27

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friends of mine that are contract programmers have been ramping on Rust for the past 2-3 years claiming the number of requests for it has been increasing exponentially. I installed it two weeks ago and have been getting a feel for it. It's like if C++, C#, and npm had an offspring. I always hoped Java would make a comeback, but Rust is looking like the real deal.

Applications of Java and Rust do not overlap. As a big data engineer, Rust does not provide any advantage to me. Good luck rewritting all the big data tools from Java (Elasticsearch, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Neo4j, Deeplearning4j, Cassandra, Solr, Arrow, OrientDB) and all the scientific stuff from C++ (Eigen, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Jax, Halide, OpenCV and the multitude of resources for CUDA and OpenCL) and databases (MySQ…

There will be people who downvote you because...

- You are hijacking a top comment to insert your off-topic opinion.

- You appear to be more territorial than presenting some sort of argument.

- You are overly negative and somewhat dismissive/disrespectful.

- You are commenting on downvotes, which is generally frowned upon

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#46

Post by nicoburns » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

ibraheemdev wrote: post #31

nicoburns wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has C#, F# and Visual Basic that are rather more significant than Project Verona.

True but I was thinking more in the systems programming context

Ah, I don't think Go, Swift or Hack (from the tweet you are replying to) really apply to systems programming contexts any more than C# does.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#47

Post by johnnujler » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #4

I believe that's Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook all looking to get involved in core Rust development (I think partially triggered by the Mozilla layoffs). If anybody was still harbouring doubts about Rust's future, now is the time to lay them aside.

Great thing but I feel these companies are just too clever for Rust. Rust is a developer’s delight and I don’t want it to become like C++, and I feel the C++ standard got worse especially after these so-called great companies became a part of the standards committee. Or take the example of Web, made worse after the Googles and the Apples of the world got in.

So I have mixed feelings about too many clever people doing too many clever things to an awesome language.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#48

Post by jpgvm » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #36

johnnycerberus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applications of Java and Rust do not overlap. As a big data engineer, Rust does not provide any advantage to me. Good luck rewritting all the big data tools from Java (Elasticsearch, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Neo4j, Deeplearning4j, Cassandra, Solr, Arrow, OrientDB) and all the scientific stuff from C++ (Eigen, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Jax, Halide, OpenCV and the multitude of resources for CUDA and OpenCL) and databases (MySQ…

Why do you need to rewrite them? Rust can call C++ code, just like Java and Python can. (I note you list Python libraries like Tensorflow and PyTorch as C++, which is accurate because they're written in C++, but they're certainly heavily used from a non-C++ language.)

Rust definitely makes sense anywhere you are currently using C/C++ or Python/Ruby.

Java is somewhat of a special case though, especially the Big Data ecosystem. Much of the fastest and most important Java tools are written in pure Java (or other JVM language) and as such can't be called from Rust in a reasonable way.

Writing Big Data code in Rust is certainly possible from a performance perspective but is an uphill battle of lack of libraries, integration, etc. Some of this might change in time but I don't see Rust ever displacing Java from Big Data. One of the big reasons for this is the main downside of Java is it's GC, which is mainly problematic for latency sensitive applications. In the Big Data field this is substantially reduced as a problem as the code is usually throughput bound and executed outside of interactive contexts, hiding the cost of the GC where it might be more apparent in other applications.

I love Rust and I think it has a lot of potential to replace some of the databases and networked services used in data infrastructure, just don't see it displacing Java as the top dog.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#49

Post by free_rms » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

wbl wrote: post #40

kortilla wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has lived through hype cycles, big companies can pull the rug just as quickly on these investments as they’ve made them. While this does indicate a more serious interest, it’s not nearly the safety net you think. To the contrary, a bunch of FAANG driven contributions tend to make projects focused too much on particular use cases. Go’s clusterfuck of package management is entirely because Google doesn’t…

What clusterfuck? The current version module system works if people can maintain compat. If not, nothing will save you.

It took them like a decade to get there though, all the while telling the entire non-Google world that they must be doing something wrong if they want versioning for their dependencies.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#50

Post by andrewmcwatters » Tue, Nov 24, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

Am I just not "with it?" I don't see the appeal of Rust, but it gets the hottest talk in HN-town.

Maybe it's just because I haven't worked long enough with C or C++ to complain about them (only about a decade or so), but I don't have any issues with those languages. And I find it wholly unappealing to abandon the existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems all in the name of whatever it is that Rust delivers on. I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and experiment with something I can't take off the shelf and be productive with from day one.

I've also mentioned I just can't stand the way the language looks. It's ugly as sin, and I know I'm not alone in that opinion.

I made some crude comments in a previous thread here on HN about Servo, but still came away with the feeling there was literally no one using Servo, the site didn't tell you how to actually use it, and no one cared, but the hype was unreal because it was web tech written in Rust.

Edit: The points on this post are fluctuating wildly. If you're interested in Rust, could you share your knowledge with some of us who are on the fence like me instead of downvoting? It doesn't actually help me understand anything about the language or community other than I shouldn't criticize Rust because its users will downvote you.