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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

#161

Post by bbatha »

augusto-moura wrote: post #52
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…

You are saying different things as one argument. Yes, Java applications and Rust mostly don't overlap, but there are exceptions in both ecosystems. Rust might offer some advantages for Data Engineers (the same way as CUDA applications in C++), not all of them as with every language else, and yes you can write Data centric libraries in Rust for Python (easier than C/C++ IIRC). And no, there's no need to rewrite existi…

There are a lot of database-like services written Java (Kafka, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Neo4J, HBase) that would likely be better in Rust. Yes the common denominator is Apache but they seem to have bought into Rust as well https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2019/02/04/datafusion-donation...

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

#162

Post by tutfbhuf »

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…

> databases (MySQL, MongoDB)

We are heading towards distributed high available SQL and NoSQL databases (with Redis, Postgres and MySQL compatibility for easier migration) designed to work exceptionally well in cloud environments like CockroachDB (Go), TiKV (Rust), Vitess (Go) to name a few.

That is because SRE teams want to be able to scale horizontally and make a node, rack or even region failure to be a normal thing, their company don't need to worry about.

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

#163

Post by andrewmcwatters »

Jtsummers wrote: post #142
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…

It has C and C++'s performance without a lot of the footguns. A better type system. The trait system is a nicer way to extend types than C++'s class system (IMO). Generics from the start, instead of absent (C) or added on and still not fully utilized by practitioners (C++, some practitioners get the value, other offices bar using them). The ownership model means that using the lower level concurrency primitives is le…

Is it possible to use Rust without much necessary usage of generics?

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

#165

Post by basicneo »

johnnycerberus wrote: post #71
jodrellblank wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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.

I think you're being downvoted because this is a bit passive aggressive.

That said, I sense a bit of Rust bias on HN.

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

#166

Post by steveklabnik »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #156
proverbialbunny wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm wrong and can't have those thoughts. There is a difference between facts and opinions, yah?

I'm not trying really hard to argue facts or even talking about performance numbers or anything of the sort. There are people who really, really love Rust, and I'd love to better understand how some developers arrived at their opinions of the software. If there's a killer reason outside of memory safety and ownership, like compiler speed or something, I'd love to hear more about it from first hand accounts rather tha…

I hear what you're saying in this sub-thread. I will say that your "toy" comment didn't make it seem like you were interested in having a real discussion, but mostly just throwing shade, as they say. The whole comment has this vague undertone of "I am above this whole thing." This is probably why you're running into some difficulty. There's not just the crew that loves Rust, but also a very, very dedicated set of Rust haters, and it's really easy to bucket someone, incorrectly, into one or the other, based on initial impression.

One interesting thing in this comment, and why I chose to respond to it though, is it seems like what you want isn't just a description, but a specific kind of description from a specific kind of person. That is, it has to be "first-hand" but also not from someone who "sell[s] some product written in Rust." How can you get first-hand knowledge without building something? How can you demonstrate that that knowledge is legitimate without also letting people know that you have done that work? It seems impossible to me.

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

#167

Post by AlisdairO »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #85
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…

To those taking the time to sell me on it, thank you. I really appreciate you all sharing why Rust is important. I value a lot of the mentioned benefits listed below, specifically wrt speed, but I'm not finding the trade-off there yet. I work with codebases and projects where the expense of time is far too high to justify its usage, especially in existing designs where there is no meaningful way to extend the codebas…

FWIW I expect you're getting downvoted for tone. In particular:

> I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and play with toys.

Implication: Rust is just a toy, people who use it have too much time on their hands, and they're not experienced enough to have good judgement.

IMO if you're interested in a productive conversation you'd probably have better luck if you simply omitted content like the above: it doesn't add to the conversation, and is inevitably going to raise hackles among those who disagree with you.

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

#168

Post by autarch »

mattgreg wrote: post #136

Want to work with Rust? Ockam.io loves Rust, and we are hiring! https://www.ockam.io/team#open-roles

The read more button on https://www.ockam.io/team is a 404 (to https://www.ockam.io/learn/guides/team/values_and_virtues_on...).

Also, there's an "Ockam Values" header right below with no content under it. Edit: but not if I go directly to the page. Maybe it was a transient Chrome bug.

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

#169

Post by renewiltord »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #123
renewiltord wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of articles for the advantages of Rust. Consider just searching for some of them on Google since they will, in general, be written in a more considered fashion than a response to your comment. In an effort to be transparent, I will downvote your comment because I like novelty and interesting new things, not the nth version of a BSD is dead or Vim v Emacs discussion, which is what you're spawning.

It really sucks on HN that users like you who get past a particular karma threshold hold down users who have legitimate curious questions. It incentivizes not having unpopular discussions, and really turns me off to the site entirely. So could you please not? This isn't a facetious statement. I'm trying to keep this on topic: AWS loves Rust, so maybe I should, too. Could we have a discussion about why? The mechanism…

Sorry, legitimate curiosity is too low a threshold for me. If you want to chat further about this POV, happy to discuss over email (in profile). Would rather not pollute this thread.

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

#170

Post by jfengel »

gibolt wrote: post #84
smarx007 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

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.

Despite some surface differences, Kotlin and Java are so similar that "losing" one to the other isn't really that big a change. They run on the same platforms and they use the same frameworks, dependencies, debuggers, and other tooling.

A Java developer will pick up Kotlin much faster than, say, a Postgres developer will pick up Mongo. It takes a lot longer for a Java programmer to learn the Android environment than the Kotlin language.

If there were a trend from Java towards Rust or Go or Python, that would be a significant change in the world. If Java were to vanish tomorrow and everybody had to pick up Kotlin, the world would be pretty much the same in a week. Kotlin is nice, benefitting from a clean-sheet implementation of lessons that Java takes on only with difficulty, but it's not a wholesale break.

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