Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 338 posts

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

#171

Post by proverbialbunny »

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…

You're side stepping what I said. The point is people will downvote false facts, but rarely downvote opinions that do not have an underpinning of false facts.

Furthermore, you're lying. You've gotten tons of responses here as to why some people use Rust or like Rust, yet you then continue to spout that you want what you've already have gotten.

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

#172

Post by steveklabnik »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #163
Jtsummers wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Defining your own? Absolutely. Using them at all? Basically impossible. The standard (and core) library is entirely built around it.

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

#173

Post by dcgudeman »

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.

Why do you think it has anything to do with Mozilla layoffs?

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

#174

Post by andrewmcwatters »

AlisdairO wrote: post #167
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

OK, good point. Removing it.

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

#175

Post by cambalache »

stagger87 wrote: post #45
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…

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

If by "hijack" you mean offering a contrarian opinion then this site would be rendered useless. This is a puff marketing piece for AWS first and Rust second, you cannot expect 100% fawning adoration (dont worry, there will be plenty still).

If by "you appear" you wanted to say "it appears to me" OK. It didnt appear to me.

OP is a little big negative, so that's great to temper the "a little too positive" comments.So it's a win in my book.

Yeah I agree with your last point, but I also consider the ones who downvote because that equally as petty, adding more noise to the site.

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

#176

Post by smt88 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #115
k__ wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Rust community alone is so much better than anything I've seen in my 15 year programming career. The communities of statically typed programming languages were especially elitist and gatekeeping. The Rust community is welcoming.

I've basically had nothing but downvotes from the Rust community because any time I point something out about my thoughts on the language, I'm wrong and can't have those thoughts. Some one here in a separate thread said, "I don't understand your hate," and I'm like, what hate? It's a programming language. I don't hate it, I just don't yet find a reason to use it, but maybe I'm missing something really big. It's not r…

People are downvoting you because you're writing things that are:

- factually wrong (revealing you don't know very basic info about Rust)

- anecdotal

- inflammatory (as you yourself admit when you say your comments were "crude")

It's not that people are being fanboys. I see lots of non-downvoted comments about not wanting to use Rust. Look at any HN thread about Zig, and you'll see a ton of non-grey comments that say Zig is better or that modern C/C++ don't need replacing.

If you want to sincerely debate Rust, you should learn the basics (for example, understanding how it's intended to reuse the C ecosystem, not "throw it away"); stop insulting other people in the thread (e.g. saying that using Rust is "playing with toys"); and acknowledging that it's not intended to appeal to anyone who thinks they're able to perfectly manage memory in C/C++ without any mistakes.

On that last point: no one with a lot of experience in C/C++ thinks it's possible to manage memory in those languages without dangerous bugs, and increasingly people think adopting a new language (Rust) is a good trade-off for avoiding whole classes of memory bugs.

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

#177

Post by steveklabnik »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #160
piercebot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons it's so enchanting is how it manages memory without the use of a garbage collector thanks to the magic of lifetimes. Couple that with performance that's on par with C/C++ and design choices that encourage testing and documentation... there are a lot of technical reasons to love Rust. The welcoming community is another great reason, but I'll let community leaders speak to that point. In terms of how…

I definitely love the rustfmt thing. I think I recall gofmt existing as well? I feel like C++ can get really out of hand, so not having a cppfmt is surely a thing of jealousy.

It does exist, and importantly, existed earlier, and has effectively no configuration. This means its usage is significantly more, and more internally consistent. Frankly I am a bit jealous, but I only have myself to blame here :)

There are people who like gofmt and dislike rustfmt.

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

#178

Post by gpm »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #163
Jtsummers wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depends what you mean I guess. You can certainly write code that doesn't create more generic structs, and needing to create more generic structs when writing simple application plumbing code is relatively rare. On the flip side you also certainly want to use stdlib (and third party) libraries and instantiate generic structs they define. For example a list of T objects is most commonly stored in a Vec where T is a generic, or for a builtin example a fixed sized array is a `[T; N]` where both T and N are generic. There's also approximately no reason to avoid generics.

All in all the frequency of use of generics is pretty similar to languages like C++ or Scala.

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

#180

Post by _J_Ten_ »

This is huge for Rust. I always had a love/hate relationship with Rust. Love for the language and runtime characteristics. The lack of stability of the ecosystem combined with the small standard lib and the enthusiats/hobbyist mindset (sorry, but that was my impression) was a show stopper for using it in business apps where Rust could be great but was not strictly necessary.
Post reply on HN