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Why Rust is a great choice for startups

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Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#11

Post by eventhorizonpl »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #10
chungus wrote: post #5

>(...) despite my experience and best intentions, I was in fact making mistakes with C. Subtle leaks, use-after-free,(...) Rust made it very clear that I was not the programmer I thought I was. This really resonated with me. I feel a lot more confident writing code in Rust than say in C or Java. However, in my opinion, it also comes with a downside: These days, whenever I use a 'more forgiving' programming language I…

I still find this type of comment odd (although I do also recognise that it's very common). I write a lot of code in C++. And I'm definitely no fan of it, so I'm not here to defend it! And I write a lot of bugs in that code. But very few of them are segfaults. With smart pointers and some common sense, they're just not that big of a concern. Yes, they do happen, but it's far a minority of the bugs. Maybe everyone jus…

It's not that big issue https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#12

Post by XorNot »

sshine wrote: post #9
ncmncm wrote: post #2

Rust is a great choice for startups because most startups fold and so will not need to try to find people who know how to maintain it.

I would argue that Rust is a great choice for startups exactly because you can find people who will either take a pay cut or work in a hectic environment, just so they can use Rust. Rust has been on top of everyone's "want to learn" list for half a decade, and it feels quite mature.

It's at the top of my "want to learn" list because I want to learn it but I'm definitely not taking a pay cut to do so.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#13

Post by ThePhysicist »

I started my first Rust project a month ago after working for years in Golang and before that Python (and before that Perl, C/C++ and Turbo Pascal). I really like the whole experience but I'm not sure if I'd recommend writing all your backend code in Rust as a startup.

Rust definitely provides a pleasant experience and is very powerful. If you can stick to the standard library I think Rust is great, though the package ecosystem is still lacking in many respects and most packages seem immature and quite limited. So if you plan to build something that has sizeable external dependencies plan some time to either write that yourself or to spend a lot of time debugging and vetting external packages, many of which are maintained as side projects by single developers. Documentation often also seems to be subpar as compared to e.g. Python. I suppose that's due to the auto-generation of documentation which seems to lead to people mostly writing what I'd refer to as API documentation with very few tutorials.

So is Rust worth it for a startup? Not so sure. I recently picked up Python again to write a simple REST API, and the process is just so much faster and (for me) enjoyable because of the "ad hocness" of the language and of course the great existing tooling around it (I still have to find an ORM as powerful as SQLAlchemy in Rust or Golang). And let's be honest it's also possible to write great scalable services in Python (or Ruby, or Javascript), as many scaleups still use these technologies.

Onboarding of developers might be another issue: Yeah, everyone wants to be a Rust programmer, but for people that have little experience with systems programming the learning curve is quite steep, so you'll limit your candidate pool quite a bit and will need more time for hiring.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#14

Post by deepstack »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #13

I started my first Rust project a month ago after working for years in Golang and before that Python (and before that Perl, C/C++ and Turbo Pascal). I really like the whole experience but I'm not sure if I'd recommend writing all your backend code in Rust as a startup. Rust definitely provides a pleasant experience and is very powerful. If you can stick to the standard library I think Rust is great, though the packag…

Deno could be a good alternative. It should hit GA 3 QT this year.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#15

Post by lnxg33k1 »

sshine wrote: post #9
ncmncm wrote: post #2

Rust is a great choice for startups because most startups fold and so will not need to try to find people who know how to maintain it.

I would argue that Rust is a great choice for startups exactly because you can find people who will either take a pay cut or work in a hectic environment, just so they can use Rust. Rust has been on top of everyone's "want to learn" list for half a decade, and it feels quite mature.

Definitely I would not take a pay cut for rust, also for any technology, it’s about solving problems and working on interesting things not really about a language. I’ve also been learning rust in my spare time, and am more and more realising that I spend time solving rust’s problems more than solving the problems of the side project I started

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#16

Post by hellokittycity »

eventhorizonpl wrote: post #11
quietbritishjim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find this type of comment odd (although I do also recognise that it's very common). I write a lot of code in C++. And I'm definitely no fan of it, so I'm not here to defend it! And I write a lot of bugs in that code. But very few of them are segfaults. With smart pointers and some common sense, they're just not that big of a concern. Yes, they do happen, but it's far a minority of the bugs. Maybe everyone jus…

It's not that big issue https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

This is why we need a professional organization to hold software developers accountable to the same standard as other fields of engineering.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#17

Post by flohofwoe »

eventhorizonpl wrote: post #11
quietbritishjim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find this type of comment odd (although I do also recognise that it's very common). I write a lot of code in C++. And I'm definitely no fan of it, so I'm not here to defend it! And I write a lot of bugs in that code. But very few of them are segfaults. With smart pointers and some common sense, they're just not that big of a concern. Yes, they do happen, but it's far a minority of the bugs. Maybe everyone jus…

It's not that big issue https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

That's 70% of CVEs, not 70% of all bugs, which is a massive difference. Most programmers don't deal with CVE worthy bugs on a daily basis, no matter what programming language they use.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#18

Post by lionside »

I’ve been working on an OS project to help people get on this bandwagon: create-rust-app [1]. The folks over at shuttle.rs also wrote a blogpost around a similar topic which was a very interesting read as a rust developer. [2]

[1] https://github.com/Wulf/create-rust-app

[2] https://www.shuttle.rs/blog/2021/10/08/building-a-startup-wi...

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#19

Post by eventhorizonpl »

eventhorizonpl wrote: post #11
quietbritishjim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find this type of comment odd (although I do also recognise that it's very common). I write a lot of code in C++. And I'm definitely no fan of it, so I'm not here to defend it! And I write a lot of bugs in that code. But very few of them are segfaults. With smart pointers and some common sense, they're just not that big of a concern. Yes, they do happen, but it's far a minority of the bugs. Maybe everyone jus…

It's not that big issue https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

@hellokittycity

There are ideas like that

https://it.slashdot.org/story/22/06/13/0134242/two-tech-ceos...

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#20

Post by AshamedCaptain »

eventhorizonpl wrote: post #11
quietbritishjim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find this type of comment odd (although I do also recognise that it's very common). I write a lot of code in C++. And I'm definitely no fan of it, so I'm not here to defend it! And I write a lot of bugs in that code. But very few of them are segfaults. With smart pointers and some common sense, they're just not that big of a concern. Yes, they do happen, but it's far a minority of the bugs. Maybe everyone jus…

It's not that big issue https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

70% of all security issues is not 70% of all bugs. For the large majority of software products, security issues are an infinitesimal minority of bugs, and arguably, for a significant chunk of software products, security issues are not even critical.
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