Related: AWS is building a deep bench of Rust talent [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151056
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Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
221–230 of 338 posts
Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
#222Earlier 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…
You can use dynamic linking with Rust. You just have to stick to the C ABI when interfacing w/ shared objects, because there is no stable Rust-specific ABI.
Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go is the language with very fast compile times; Rust's aren't particularly good, and, depending on the exact details, maybe slower than C++'s. It's pretty variable. We've been working on it but it's non-trivial. There are tons of tools in Rust to preprocess headers, and do even more fun things like https://github.com/Hywan/inline-c-rs (which is obviously not a general solution to this problem but is interesting)
Oh very cool. Maybe I should spend some more time looking into those. Thanks for pointing that out!
No problem. Some links to get you started:
* https://crates.io/crates/bindgen (generate Rust FFI from headers)
* https://crates.io/crates/cbindgen (the inverse of bindgen)
* https://cxx.rs/ (a similar tool to bindgen, newer)
Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
#224I 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 don't think Java ever left. It's still used everywhere I've worked in the past 15 years, usually quite extensively. Just because it's not the hot language to talk about on HN it's still out there and quite healthy. Personally I'd been hoping that c# and it's kin would take all of Java's core business, but it really hasn't
Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Rus…
Yeah, sorry about that Steve. That was crass. I appreciate you sharing some thoughts here.
With respect to people's experiences, there are a lot more developers than developer/salesmen. The latter are more passionate by necessity, so I think there's a healthy band of feedback from those consuming the language maybe for work or hobby projects.
Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
My comment in on point, not off-topic. I had no intention to "hijack" the top comment, didn't even think about that until I've seen your comment. I don't see Rust as a replacement for Java and I also pointed out that Rust has to win the mindshare of C++ programmers first, before even reaching other ecosystems. Rust is mainly a replacement for C++.
Your comment that Java and Rust don't overlap is valid, but going on to discuss how you're going to keep using C++ and Python, and how Unreal Engine uses C++, is wildly irrelevant. Rust isn't going to replace Java, but it may supplant Java in a lot of fields where one wants both memory safety and an OO language with high performance. No one is (rationally) suggesting that Rust will replace every language. The tone of…
Small clarification — Rust very deliberately does not do OO. It has features that look sort of like OO from a syntactic standpoint, but being object oriented is not a design goal for Rust.
Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
#227Earlier 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…
> Applications of Java and Rust do not overlap.
Both are general purpose languages, so of course they overlap.
> Good luck rewritting all the big data tools from Java (Elasticsearch, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Neo4j, Deeplearning4j, Cassandra, Solr, Arrow, OrientDB)
Cassandra (https://scylladb.com) and Kafka (https://vectorized.io) have already been rewritten once in C++, with massive latency and throughput improvements. No reason why they couldn't get their superior Rust clones in the observable future.
Materialize (https://materialize.com), Noria (https://github.com/mit-pdos/noria), and Sled (https://github.com/spacejam/sled) are just some of the Rust database projects that are aiming at unseating the de facto standard implementations in the space. InfluxDB (https://www.influxdata.com) is now doing major Rust development as well.
The future is almost here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.
Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Rus…
Yeah, sorry about that Steve. That was crass. I appreciate you sharing some thoughts here. With respect to people's experiences, there are a lot more developers than developer/salesmen. The latter are more passionate by necessity, so I think there's a healthy band of feedback from those consuming the language maybe for work or hobby projects.
It's cool! Commenting on the internet is hard! And not everyone will like Rust, and that's super okay. You may also end up trying it and deciding you don't like it. That is 100% fine, no matter what upvotes or downvotes say.
Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
The meme of the Rust Evangalism Strikeforce exists for a reason - because a person can't say anything remotely uncomplementary about Rust without getting dogpiled and downvoted into oblivion. The Rust community has proven itself, outside of the Rust specific forums, to be exceptionally elitist. And, as shown in a sibling thread, the founders of Rust are right there on the dogpile attacking the character and dissectin…
I've come to the conclusion that many people just project whatever they want onto these kinds of conversations, positive and negative. For example, in my comment, I very much said "made it seem" and suggested that maybe people were misunderstanding the poster, not attacking their character. Many people post many negative things about Rust, including those who are its most fervent advocates. But the gray areas mean th…
"made it seem" "suggested" "misunderstanding"
Polite or not, using "soft" words or not, attacking the character of someone – "[you're not] interested in having a real discussion", "[you only want] a specific kind of description from a specific kind of person" – does Rust, and its community, absolutely no favors.
> Many people post many negative things about Rust
And I have no doubt that you'll continue to be there, "gently" correcting them.
Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but from my perspective (you probably had better insight into these companies involvement than me) there was always a question about how committed companies this large really are when they only have a few projects in the language. Hiring core developers puts all doubts to bed (and also the kind of investment that actually for counts for something).
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…
Disclosure: I work at Amazon where I build AWS infrastructure
This is where I think mindful investments in building and maintaining a diverse community of developers and users is especially important for a system component like a programming language. From my perspective, this is an important feature of Rust that we should seek to maintain (as I've mentioned before elsewhere [1]).