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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

#131

Post by vlang1dot0 »

blitblitblit wrote: post #106
steveklabnik wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't make any particular statements about what an organization that doesn't even exist yet may or may not do with its property. Who is "we", in this case, out of curiosity?

Any OS distribution, e.g. Debian maintainers should be asking permission to patch rust per Media Guidelines, but it doesn't always happen.

Reading the Media Guidelines, I don't see how you came to that conclusion:

> TL;DR: Most non-commercial uses of the Rust/Cargo names and logos are allowed and do not require permission; most commercial uses require permission. In either case, the most important rule is that uses of the trademarks cannot appear official or imply any endorsement by the Rust project.

https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/media-guide

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

#132

Post by rossmohax »

Twitter previously invested in Scala, which significantly contributed to it's adoption outside of relatively small community back then. Another part of success was Spark.

It looks like Rust gains bigcorp support, all we need now is a killer product written in it to kick off explosive growth.

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

#133

Post by steveklabnik »

Thaxll wrote: post #90
gibolt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These insights are a snapshot, not a trend line. Java can be in rapid decline and still be at the top of the list. Changing acceleration, not position, is how you make a comeback. Java is currently losing Android devs to Kotlin. That could cause a precipitous drop in direct usage in the coming years.

Java is nowhere close losing the #1/2 spot in programming language, it's just everywhere.

I agree that Java is not going anywhere, but I could absolutely see a world where JavaScript and Python are number one and two.

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

#134

Post by cogman10 »

brandmeyer wrote: post #108
cogman10 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

> 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. Dynamic linkage is not the slow part of application startup. The slow part (for applications which are slow) is almost always the gathering of non-compiled assets from disk. IMO, the lack of dynamic linkage is Rust's #2 weak point, second only to slow build time…

Sorry, that wasn't a dynamic linking dig, but more of a JIT dig.

I agree that rust would be better with dynamic linking. It sucks that you have to build everything when you build one thing :(.

The issue I was specifically thinking of is how slow an untuned JVM can be for startup times and to get to peak performance (It HAS gotten better, but is nowhere near as fast as rust or even python). The default for these JITed languages is to pass everything through a non-optimized code path and only optimize later when the various methods are exercised enough.

Rust has an advantage here in that it doesn't do any sort of runtime analysis to improve performance. It simply is as fast as it always will be.

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

#135

Post by xiphias2 »

toyg wrote: post #122
cogman10 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

Realistically, three of those 5 points are non-issues for C/C++ devs. The last is only relevant for certain types of workload. So you’re left with one real killer-feature of Rust: the safety. It’s a massive feature that cascades very well into pretty much anything you do... but it’s also one feature really - the benefits of which might not be particularly relevant on large established projects who have probably addre…

> the benefits of which might not be particularly relevant on large established projects who have probably addressed that problem a long time ago

It's quite the opposite: the larger a C/C++ project gets, the more problem you are starting to have with safety. Securing and modifying millions of lines of C/C++ code (especially if it's multi-threaded) is a nightmare, and actually impossible, where people are afraid to refactor old code because all the ownership uncertanities.

Rust changes a global ownership tracking problem to a local one.

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

#137

Post by masklinn »

astan wrote: post #86

Mixed feelings, on one hand, I'm so excited about the investment since I'm a big fan of Rust, on the other, I don't want it to be a clusterfuck like IETF and web standards development where companies like Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla get to dictate what is and isn't allowed on the web. I just hope the Rust community is able to stand up for itself and resist inclusion of unnecessary things against these big play…

> I don't want it to be a clusterfuck like IETF and web standards development where companies like Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla get to dictate what is and isn't allowed on the web.

You may want to note that there's a pretty damn big difference between the two: the rust project needs to be interoperable with itself and that's about the extent of it.

The web needs to be interoperable period, so if there isn't some sort of buy-in or the ability to push your weight around, spec-ing or implementing something is just a waste of time.

Putting resources into the language doesn't mean you control it, and volunteer-driven projects go where they will. Python or Ruby are not owned by their sponsors.

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

#138

Post by andrewmcwatters »

woah wrote: post #117
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #50

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…

There's this odd genre of comment where people sound personally threatened by a language. Why?

Why would a person be threatened by a language? I'm asking the HN community why I should reconsider and to share their thoughts on having used Rust.

The world isn't made up of people who either love or are threatened by things. Could you not use this language?

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

#139

Post by malinens »

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.

I remember the same story about go while we had microservice craze. Now it is not a sexy language anymore

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

#140

Post by masklinn »

ufmace wrote: post #43

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.

> 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.

Is it really? Seems to me like that would easily be seen as self-serving, while putting efforts into the ecosystem as a whole means even people who don't care a whit for AWS benefit.

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