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

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> " but advocating something to be used everywhere is another story. " Where is that in the comment you replied to?

> Where is that in the comment you replied to?

I guess you don't know what the real deal is.

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

#72

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…

20 years ago, almost none of that stuff existed. It's entirely possible that whatever exists 20 years from now will all be Rust. I don't think that's likely, but I think it's more likely than the landscape you describe still existing in any recognizable form.

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

#73

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.

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.

> I always hoped Java would make a comeback

In order to make a comeback, Java first needs to fall from the TOP 3 languages used by professional programmers in the world.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...

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

#75

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…

> [...] to throw away my time and play with toys.

Rust is not a toy. It's possible that your prejudice stops you from seeing Rust's benefits. It's also possible that you're working in a niche where Rust's advantage compared to C or C++ isn't as great as for most other areas of software development. And that's okay, Rust isn't quite there yet. For some very small niches, it might never be.

> [...] existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems [...]

Frankly, even with those "decades of knowledge", C programs and libraries are still full of security vulnerabilities caused by C's limitations and memory handling. How many more decades will it take? How many more thousands of vulnerabilities?

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

#76
post #54

So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ? I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust. This post is obviously from an engineer, but i fear the day business people will start looking into ways to leverage the contribution Amazon made to Rust.

> So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ?

No? Project sponsorship, either direct or by hiring prominent contributors, have a long history in OSS support and have little to do with "owning" languages.

Did Google or Dropbox take ownership of Python when they hired GvR?

> I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust.

What are you talking about? It's literally not their decision to make.

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

#77

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…

I can give you a few reason you might like rust.

    - Instant boot time.  Because rust is statically compiled, there's no runtime startup or anything involved with it.  From dead to alive is pretty much instant.
    - Low memory footprint.  Because rust does not use a GC, it doesn't need all the bits and pieces of memory storage that modern GCs require.  The memory allocated is (close to) the minimal memory needed to run the application.  Further, due to it's low level nature, it's a lot easier to avoid heap allocations all together and instead focus on stack allocations.
    - It's safe to deploy and expose to the internet.  You'd be a fool to setup a public facing C++/or C application.  That memory model is simply too expensive to safely do even if you did want all the benefits of using a system language.  Not so with rust.  Client facing rust services or even just backends that may see client data are safe to push out.
    - It's fast.  Rust has no startup or warmup time.  From boot it is running just as fast as it ever will be.  This means you don't have to have a warmup period or periods of slow runtime as you scale out rust applications.  That consistent performance is easy to plan for.  That speed and low memory usage have the added bonus of making rust really good if you are trying to optimize operation costs.  You can use smaller or less instances to get the same amount of work done.
    - The model model not only makes memory safe, it prevents different types of concurrency bugs.  While rust won't prevent ALL classes of concurrency issues, it will prevent several of them.  That makes it easier to write parallel applications.
Certainly, if none of those things are issues for you, then there's no reason to give rust a second glance. However, I personally see rust as super exciting because of all of those aspects.

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

#78

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…

The language team is the sole group of people who decides how the language itself changes over time. Entry into that team is determined by the consensus of the team itself. Anyone can comment on proposals, and of course, a company could hire those individuals, but it's not possible to become a decision maker (or stay one) without the explict consent of the existing set of decision makers.

That being said, we (that is, the Rust team broadly, I am not on the language team) do weigh companies' desires fairly heavily, because we want Rust to be used for real, important things by companies. But it's always a balance. Famously, the lang team even resisted some proposals by the Servo team way back in the day, even though most people involved on all sides were Mozilla employees at the time.

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

#80

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.

> I always hoped Java would make a comeback In order to make a comeback, Java first needs to fall from the TOP 3 languages used by professional programmers in the world. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...

If Android would've dumped Java it would've fallen from the top 3 a long time ago.

I thought that Oracle winning the lawsuit against Google would for sure light a fire under Google's asses to do that, but instead they just went ahead and adopted OpenJDK, which of course means that Java as a language will continue to remain popular.

I'm not sure Google's adoption of Kotlin is really the answer here either.

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