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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

#271

Post by twsted »

patrec wrote: post #126
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…

Debatable. Java's dominance in the data engineering space rests a bit on clay feet: it's unsuitable for scientific computing in a number of ways: for example you can neither write fast nor clean numerical code in java and it does not interface naturally with the languages that people do write numerical code in. This is not an absolute deal breaker, but it adds friction. Also, serveral big data tools like cassandra (s…

> C++ is not a very attractive language to write code in if there are viable alternatives, because it is objectively unpleasant and expensive to use

From a current perspective I may agree, but in the ‘90 a number of programmers like me was really excited to be able to develop at a much higher abstraction level than C using classes and, later, templates, preserving efficiency and performances.

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

#272

Post by smt88 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #238
smt88 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could you reconsider downvoting people who don't know about something and have a legitimate curiosity? It makes HN a really off-putting place to post.

I didn't downvote you.

The thing is that your tone doesn't seem to come across a genuinely interested. It seems like you're just throwing uninformed opinions at people without leaving an opening for discussion.

For example, you talk about not wanting to throw away the C ecosystem. Instead, you could say, "What about all the great C libraries that we're never going to rewrite in Rust? Are Rust users throwing all that work away?"

And then someone would correctly inform you that the Rust community doesn't want to throw all that work away and has spent a ton of time on interop.

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

#273

Post by andrewmcwatters »

adwn wrote: post #181
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right in that that was the original sell, but it's not how they sell it today. "Servo’s mission is to provide an independent, modular, embeddable web engine, which allows developers to deliver content and applications using web standards." So maybe they're just not there yet? But in my opinion, if you create popular software and no one uses it, it's not popular from its adoption, it's popular for some…

> I embed web tech Wait, you're working with web tech – probably the most archetypal field where preventing security vulnerabilities is the top priority – and you don't see the benefit of using Rust instead of C?

It’s definitely a major focus, but from where I operate I have to trust the embedded library to address a lot of those concerns. There’s usually very limited exposure offscreen embedders have to see to.

If Servo is any lighter than CEF, I absolutely want it to be the solution I use. So I’m very interested in its development.

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

#274

Post by chabad360 »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #245

Probably an unpopular opinion but I am not very excited by this. Getting funding and support is great, but the needs of the many are very different than the needs of AWS and Facebook. In my opinion we see this a lot in Linux as well. What Google wants has almost nothing to do with what I need. (I said almost). I think it should gestate a while in a less FAANGy environment.

It should be noted that programming languages are different from software.

AWS is paying developers to primarily work on it's needs for Linux (as that is how Linux is generally maintained, you upstream a module, you maintain it).

In Rust on the other hand (like most/all languages) new features tend to benefit everybody, AWS simply might be able to prioritize development of certain aspects, but they certainly don't get to make work almost exclusively for them.

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

#275

Post by drran »

chc wrote: post #226
danudey wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Developers do OOP even in C and asm. Rust is much better for OOP than C.

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

#276

Post by ajmadesc »

rodgerd wrote: post #266
JoshTriplett wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. On the Rust language team, we are extremely mindful of managing complexity, and we typically err on the side of not including a feature (even if it's desired) if it feels like it adds too much complexity or surface area…

The biggest problem here, though, is that look at Google in web standards: the web is now what Google say it is, IE 6 style. If Googlers don't get their way with the Rust language team, they'll just attack the language team head-on, or bypass them. Google have zero interest in collaboration.

That's why we're all using dart

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

#277

Post by aliceryhl »

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…

The primary reason why I love Rust is that the compiler catches most of my bugs at compile time. For example, I recently spent three full days on writing code without running it at all — I just made sure it compiled as I went along. Afterwards when it was time to run it, there were a few mistakes not caught by the compiler, but I was able to fix all of them in 30 minutes.

That program has been running in production without any issues since then. We use PHP for most other projects at work. I can assure you that this kind of thing is not possible with PHP.

So in short, Rust forces me to think about every edge case and error path, so I can feel confident that my code really works, even in the face of obscure situations.

In fact, this is also the first line in the AWS article in question:

> One of the most exciting things about the Rust programming language is that it makes infrastructure incredibly boring. That’s not a bad thing, in this case.

The only language I've had a similar experience from is Typescript.

That it's fast or uses only a little memory is just a bonus for me.

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

#279

Post by ufmace »

mjasay wrote: post #113
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.

It's a good call out, and one that we're actively engaged with. Matthew has done fantastic work on Rusoto and we'd like to be helpful there. Stay tuned.

Thanks, that's great to hear!

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

#280

Post by oblio »

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…

About microVMs, I'm not sure what this is referring to, but this literal post says that AWS' tech for VMs is now based on Rust :-)
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