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Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust

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Re: Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust

#41

Post by rectang »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #34
mikece wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is off-topic but isn't Rust meant to be more of a systems-level language? It seems to me that Go would be a better choice for server-side API (assuming .NET 5 and 6 are too bloated and slow for your tastes). Or is Rust finding a niche in userpace apps even though it was designed for systems level use? I am not saying apps shouldn't be written in Rust, I just don't understand the appeal. What am I missing?

I remember a time when people called Go a systems language, is that time over now?

Go can't be used for many "systems programming" problem domains because it's garbage collected. That objection is always looming when people try to call Go a "systems programming language", so I think a lot of people now classify Go as an applications programming language instead.

Re: Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust

#42

Post by uncomputation »

mikece wrote: post #11
todd3834 wrote: post #7

I’ve been really diving into Rust over this holiday break and reading through code bases like this is really helpful. Little things like a shared db connection are not intuitive on the first pass when everything is under such a strict borrow/move/release paradigm. I’m going to study this a little closer but it still isn’t super clear to me. In other languages I would probably implement a singleton of some sort. I kno…

I know this is off-topic but isn't Rust meant to be more of a systems-level language? It seems to me that Go would be a better choice for server-side API (assuming .NET 5 and 6 are too bloated and slow for your tastes). Or is Rust finding a niche in userpace apps even though it was designed for systems level use? I am not saying apps shouldn't be written in Rust, I just don't understand the appeal. What am I missing?

I personally don’t see the appeal of Go. With Rust, I can write a concurrent, safe, and C-performant program with modern programming features like matches, generic programming, and a dedicated package manager (never understood go get). To boot, Rust has a strong ecosystem and the fastest web framework out there (Actix). It takes roughly the same amount of code to do networking stuff in Rust and Go, but with Rust it is more performant and I can sleep better knowing that if it compiled, it is at least safe and won’t have any concurrency bugs.

A quick back of the paper example, I am doing Advent of Code this year and the same exact implementation took 40 ms in Rust and 350 ms in Go. Not to mention the Rust implementation, despite being the same semantically, was more concise and clear due to Rust’s extensive Iterator trait methods. A small difference you might say, but it’s just one less reason for me to switch.

Re: Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust

#43

Post by mikece »

uncomputation wrote: post #42
mikece wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is off-topic but isn't Rust meant to be more of a systems-level language? It seems to me that Go would be a better choice for server-side API (assuming .NET 5 and 6 are too bloated and slow for your tastes). Or is Rust finding a niche in userpace apps even though it was designed for systems level use? I am not saying apps shouldn't be written in Rust, I just don't understand the appeal. What am I missing?

I personally don’t see the appeal of Go. With Rust, I can write a concurrent, safe, and C-performant program with modern programming features like matches, generic programming, and a dedicated package manager (never understood go get). To boot, Rust has a strong ecosystem and the fastest web framework out there (Actix). It takes roughly the same amount of code to do networking stuff in Rust and Go, but with Rust it i…

Good to know! I've been looking at Go because it's "smaller, lighter, faster" than C# but from this description Rust might be a better next language to learn. Thank you!

Re: Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust

#44

Post by k8sToGo »

teekert wrote: post #33

I love this, it's how I run my password manager (Using docker-compose and traefik for the ui). Bitwarden works very well in iOS and Android and on Windows10 and in Firefox. Syncs are always instant, I used to use KeePassXC with NextCloud but inevitably I'd have syncing issues (admittedly, not very often). Not anymore. I still have to dig into the Organization feature to share passwords with my partner.

When I looked at it, it seemed that backing up bitwarden is much more complicated than a single KeePass file.

Re: Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust

#46

Post by masklinn »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #34
mikece wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is off-topic but isn't Rust meant to be more of a systems-level language? It seems to me that Go would be a better choice for server-side API (assuming .NET 5 and 6 are too bloated and slow for your tastes). Or is Rust finding a niche in userpace apps even though it was designed for systems level use? I am not saying apps shouldn't be written in Rust, I just don't understand the appeal. What am I missing?

I remember a time when people called Go a systems language, is that time over now?

The only people who did that was the Go team itself, and they did so in contravention of the usual interpretation of the term, as by it they meant either the completely meaningless "you can built systems with it", or that you could build systems services or utilities (which is not what is usually meant by "systems language").

Re: Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust

#47

Post by uncomputation »

celliopia wrote: post #39
mikece wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is off-topic but isn't Rust meant to be more of a systems-level language? It seems to me that Go would be a better choice for server-side API (assuming .NET 5 and 6 are too bloated and slow for your tastes). Or is Rust finding a niche in userpace apps even though it was designed for systems level use? I am not saying apps shouldn't be written in Rust, I just don't understand the appeal. What am I missing?

Why are the Rust proponents so triggered by what seems to be an honest question about the popularity of Rust? I don't know the first thing about Elixir or Erlang but I realize there are some powerful properties of BEAM and if there seemed to be a trend to rewrite apps into BEAM apps I would want to know what am I missing out on that, if clued-in, I would join the rush as well. I think that's what OP is saying here (p…

To be fair, if there were a trend to write things in Erlang and someone posted “why use Erlang and not Rust? what am i missing?” I would also expect that to be down-voted. Nothing specific to Rustaceans here. I don’t agree with downvoting the comment because it is contributing to a conversation which is what HN is all about, but it was probably the assumption that Go is already the winner in the space of networked apps when Rust has many good technical qualities as well. Like you said, clumsily worded.

Re: Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust

#48

Post by sramam »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #24
darksaints wrote: post #13

I don't have any experience with running the bitwarden server, but the primary selling point for this is that it is less resource intensive than the official server backend. The official backend is written in C#, and is currently using .NET 5. I haven't ever felt like .NET apps were particularly bloated, but I guess it's possible to write bloated code in any language. Does anybody have any insights as to what is done…

It's been a few years since I looked at the official server setup (I immediately switched to bitwarden_rs, this project), so maybe this isn't as true today: Mostly it's that the official setup is the same thing that runs their free/paid hosted service. By design, it is quite split apart into separate areas, presumably so they can scale independently of each other: https://github.com/bitwarden/server/blob/master/SETUP…

> Another benefit is that this flips all of the "paid" feature flags to true. If you self-host Bitwarden's official setup you still have to pay a subscription to use paid features.

As a developer and cheapskate user myself, I understand the appeal of this.

As a product builder, I struggle with what this means to build a business upon an open core model.

Re: Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust

#49

Post by masklinn »

mikece wrote: post #43
uncomputation wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don’t see the appeal of Go. With Rust, I can write a concurrent, safe, and C-performant program with modern programming features like matches, generic programming, and a dedicated package manager (never understood go get). To boot, Rust has a strong ecosystem and the fastest web framework out there (Actix). It takes roughly the same amount of code to do networking stuff in Rust and Go, but with Rust it i…

Good to know! I've been looking at Go because it's "smaller, lighter, faster" than C# but from this description Rust might be a better next language to learn. Thank you!

Do be warned that although interesting and rewarding and amazing in all sort of ways Rust is not easy. Where Go was designed such that it takes hours to pick up, Rust requires weeks, and possibly months before you build the intuition around the borrow checker.

If you've been looking at go, it's really not much of an investment to try it out (I wouldn't heartily recommend it as I dislike the language but you do you).

Re: Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust

#50

Post by andrepd »

terhechte wrote: post #17
todd3834 wrote: post #7

I’ve been really diving into Rust over this holiday break and reading through code bases like this is really helpful. Little things like a shared db connection are not intuitive on the first pass when everything is under such a strict borrow/move/release paradigm. I’m going to study this a little closer but it still isn’t super clear to me. In other languages I would probably implement a singleton of some sort. I kno…

I‘m on Mobile right now, but in that case you’d wrap your db in a Arc > (or Rc if you don’t need concurrency.). Then, anytime you need to access the DB, you’d try to lock the RwLock’s Writer or reader.

But isn't this imposing a runtime cost on safety? Isn't rust all about safety and performance?
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