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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

#161
post #148
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.

These comments are still in context of using the language in a startup. Good luck with finding Ocaml, F# or Scala devs.

There are much more Scala devs than Rust devs.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you pine for the nice days of C/C++, when men were men and spend hours on debugging segmentation faults?

The myth of segmentation faults being hard needs to die. A fault is like an exception in Java (or a panic in Rust for that matter), only generated by hardware. It's the best case scenario for your buggy code. It's when you don't get a segfault, but your buggy code keeps chugging along, that's a problem. If after using an out-of-bounds index into an array I get a segfault instead of a memory corruption, I thank god fo…

Depends, if it happens in prod, you are **

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#163
post #96

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.…

I write Rust and C++ for a living and completely agree with this. While I do like Rust in general, the language is so complicated that anything other than trivial programs is going to take way longer to implement than in any other language. Testing code in Rust is also half baked at best, I find that any other popular language has better capabilities than Rust in this aspect, including C++. I'd even go as far as saying that for a startup I'd use C++ before Rust if performance was a feature, otherwise I'd just go with something that has batteries included like Python or Golang.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#164
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the comparison with C (the memory management) but I wonder how do you compare Rust to Java? What is it that makes you feel more confident in Rust compared to Java?

Java _used_ to give me that "it just works" feeling when I started using it... in 1999. The rich type system makes the biggest difference. In Rust, you can solve a problem by first modelling it through structs and enums and then define operations pertaining to elements of the model. rustc (the compiler) has such a grasp on the implications of a given model that it will most often guide you toward a near-optimal (and…

Rust has a cool type system, but I think you give it much more credit, like it doesn’t have dependent types where the implementation can often be filled in literally.

Other than checking mutability and nullness, I really don’t think that Rust would be that much ahead compared to even an “older” language like Java.

Also, java now has ADTs so “exhaustive checks” are available there as well.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#165
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.

From the official "Maven in 5 Minutes" tutorial: mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.mycompany.app -DartifactId=my-app -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DarchetypeVersion=1.4 -DinteractiveMode=false From the official Rust lang book, Cargo section: cargo new my-project I guess it's a matter of taste...

My IDE does that for me, you are looking at the wrong tree.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#166
post #148
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.

These comments are still in context of using the language in a startup. Good luck with finding Ocaml, F# or Scala devs.

Do you want to discuss market share?

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#167
post #124
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing some work on a friend's startup, and we have a pretty stark divide between our hot path gateway service and our lower traffic services. All three of our services are currently written in typescript with no plans to change, but I've earmarked the gateway as "maybe we'll rewrite it in Rust in three years." It's so small it's nearly trivial (so a rewrite of that specific service will be quickish) and infrequen…

> Not sure how a hybrid approach will work. The hybrid approach works great. We use typed scripting languages for business logic and Rust CLI tools for "inner loops", and this balance gives us the best of both worlds. There is an important caveat here: If you are already comfortable in Rust, then it's a fantastic tool for all sorts of things. But if you're just learning Rust, then there's a one-time cost for getting…

The 2-6 weeks figure seems optimistic to me. I think it’s easy to underestimate how long it takes to switch languages and operate at a high level of productivity in the new language. Yes, switching languages is much easier than learning to program. Yes, I would rather hire a proficient programmer who doesn’t know the language than a mediocre programmer who does. But no, I don’t think that 6 weeks is enough for most people to get their Rust skills to a professional level.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#168
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.

Maintenance is where Rust really shines and makes up for it's initial learning curve and slightly slower writing speed. In terms of hiring I can't imagine it being a problem either. There are lots of developers who would jump at the chance to work with Rust, and comparatively few Rust jobs (especially ones that don't involve working with cryptocurrency).

I don’t believe Rust is that good at maintainability - refactors are safe, but they are very tedious, which is inherent to its low-level nature. In a managed language if a refactor causes different lifetimes/ownership model, the runtime will automatically handle it. In Rust you will have to fight the borrow checker for it.

Don’t get me wrong, Rust is a really great language, but if the domain doesn’t require low-level programming, don’t choose a low-level lang, in my opinion.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you pine for the nice days of C/C++, when men were men and spend hours on debugging segmentation faults?

The myth of segmentation faults being hard needs to die. A fault is like an exception in Java (or a panic in Rust for that matter), only generated by hardware. It's the best case scenario for your buggy code. It's when you don't get a segfault, but your buggy code keeps chugging along, that's a problem. If after using an out-of-bounds index into an array I get a segfault instead of a memory corruption, I thank god fo…

Segfault is only best-case scenario if it happens at the location with the bug.

It is extremely common to start diagnosing a segfault and find that the location of the segfault, in code, is unrelated to the code which caused the segfault.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#170
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.

Maintenance is where Rust really shines and makes up for it's initial learning curve and slightly slower writing speed. In terms of hiring I can't imagine it being a problem either. There are lots of developers who would jump at the chance to work with Rust, and comparatively few Rust jobs (especially ones that don't involve working with cryptocurrency).

Can anyone speculate why there's so much crypto using Rust as opposed to everybody else? I am afraid crypto will end up giving Rust a bad name.
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