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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

#91

Post by juped »

vegai_ wrote: post #33
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…

This kinda counter-resonates with me. I'm not a superb programmer by any means, but C's memory management rarely caused me bad problems. I find it much easier to deal with than the complexity of languages like C++ and Rust.

Calling malloc isn't even manual memory management to me, it's just calling malloc. Writing malloc (not that hard in general! but tricky to get exactly the allocator performance or security properties you want for your use case) is manual memory management.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#92

Post by yesimahuman »

I’m new to Rust and partly evaluating it for future projects at a startup, and I think I could definitely see using it selectively where it’s strengths really show. We use Go in that way as well but stick to dynamic languages in other areas. I would hesitate to go all-in on Rust given hiring is already one of the biggest challenges startups will face, but I believe Rust is going to be hugely successful and the pipeline will grow considerably in the coming years.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#93

Post by speed_spread »

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…

Rust's "lifetime stuff" really is overemphasized. You can write years of totally ok Rust code without ever having to handle a single explicit lifetime. They're there, and one should have a general picture of how they work, but unless you're doing high perf / library stuff, they can generally be sidestepped.

I believe there should be a Rust manual that shows the easy way in, using Rc/RefCell before reaching for plain references. So many people get the idea that if you're not using the hardcore smallest construct to extract that very littlest bit of performance, you're "doing Rust wrong". The overall idea of Rust is that of safe code and although the compiler and language semantics obviously play a major part in it, the standard lib is actually very nice too and helps a lot to get away from the harsh realities of bare system programming.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#94

Post by yung_steezy »

eventhorizonpl wrote: post #85
pjmlp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, F# with NuGet/Fake, Scala or Kotlin with Maven/Gradle, OCaml with OPAM. Those points are hardly Rust specific and apply to any compiled language with ML influences.

Quoted post unavailable.

I completely disagree with this sentiment. I don't see how this is relevant for an open source language.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#95

Post by m_a_g »

staticassertion wrote: post #90
m_a_g wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to add that async Rust still doesn't really work. That is a big negative for Rust.

It definitely works just fine

You can find great examples of Rust async programming being "a disaster and a mess". You still can consider it is working just fine, but I disagree.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#96

Post by wooque »

Blog post is just rationalization for their choice. Rust is actually terrible choice for startups.

It will take 2x more time to develop same thing than using something like TypeScript/Python and you will have much smaller and more expensive talent pool. Startups usually have to make, at least minimum viable, product quickly and start selling it before funds dry out. That means using familiar tech with big ecosystem.

Also choice of tech is probably least important thing contributing to startup success. That knows anyone who worked in terrible codebases that were generating multi-million revenue. Customers don't care about your tech. Simple as.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#97

Post by nerdponx »

eventhorizonpl wrote: post #21
flohofwoe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's fact that it's easiest to cause a CVE bug in a language that you manually manage memory. So it's true that most likely JavaScript programmers may not cause them too often ;)

Case in point, no? How many companies need to use a programming language with manual memory management?

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#98

Post by olalonde »

staticassertion wrote: post #90
m_a_g wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to add that async Rust still doesn't really work. That is a big negative for Rust.

It definitely works just fine

My main issue with Rust async was that it wasn't possible to write a "runtime agnostic" libraries. For example, I wrote an HTTP client with Tokio and later wanted to use it in a project that was using another runtime (I think it was async-std) and couldn't use it. I wonder if that has changed since then?

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#99

Post by stevepeg »

dannersy wrote: post #87
stevepeg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here: didn't expect this to get on the front page, some kind of life goal achieved I guess. Here's a link to our Show HN from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31630604

I may have significant input on a green field project, which is generically a web use case, but performance will be a factor. I'm interested in pitching it, as I know other teammates will be be, but none of us are particularly skilled in writing Rust. For instance, the largest thing I've written is still half baked which happens to be a basic REST API for a personal project. I have only begun to see some of the benef…

No worries, here's my opinion (lots of lang-war stuff, so note "opinion"):

I would say that it depends on your comfort with async code in Rust since much of the web ecosystem is built that way.

If you're comfortable writing async Rust then go for it, the guard rails are there. People complain (especially here) but it's fine. Our entire web backend and our scheduler applications are overwhelmingly async. We have not hit the weird stuff you read about with lifetimes even once.

However, it does expect you to know how it works. You need to understand what the async runtime does otherwise it will add friction. If you're not yet proficient with this part of Rust then you will benefit from having an "expert" on the team as you say, since they can guide the rest.

Our team were all experienced in Rust already when hired so we didn't hit this. If you're uncomfortable then simply choose the language your team already knows. That's the pragmatic choice.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#100

Post by pornel »

I'd say with a caveat it depends if you know what you need to build. You can have 0 bugs, but if you also have 0 users, it's not going to end well.

If you've already built a slow or not-so-reliable prototype in a scripting language, and have users pushing it beyond its limits, then go ahead and make the proper version in Rust.

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