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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

#191

Post by haspok »

premek wrote: post #48
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 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?

I think you shouldn't compare Rust to Java (the language), you should compare it to Java (the ecosystem). The JVM is rock solid and very performant, and you have languages like Java++ (called Kotlin) and Haskell# (called Scala), or even Common Scheme (called Clojure). The same is true for the ecosystem, eg. build tools (Maven/Gradle are the default ones, but there are many more), frameworks (Spring + all the reactive stuff), the largest number of libraries on the planet after C, and so on.

The target niche is not exactly the same though, you wouldn't want to systems program on the JVM, and it would probably not make much sense to choose Rust over Spring Boot for web programming. YMMV of course.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#192

Post by ThePhysicist »

drogus wrote: post #145
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…

> I recently picked up Python again to write a simple REST API, and the process is just so much faster For me it's much more important how will it work in the next few years, not how quickly you can write it. If I could, I would use Rust for pretty much everything just because I don't like getting paged in the middle of the night.

I have both Python and Golang web services in production for years, none of them cause much headache. I'm not running a hyperscale startup though and server hosting is the smallest cost factor for running my products, so I don't worry about performance that much. Most workloads are IO-bound (database queries) in any case, so Python isn't too much at a disadvantage over Golang or Rust there. In terms of stability I never had any major issue with Python services, and when minor issues occured the logging and tracebacks were so good that it was easy to isolate and fix the problem (the same is also true for Golang).

I guess the older you become the less you care about specific tools or languages, for me it's mostly the general architecture and operating principles of the software that determines if a system will be brittle or not.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#193

Post by ThePhysicist »

mikevm wrote: post #150
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…

I wouldn't touch Python with 10-foot pole for any serious project. People who're used to dynamic languages (e.g., JavaScript) are now starting to see how indispensable static typing is when they try out TypeScript and then never want to go back.

I also write Python with type annotations and the type checker keeps getting better and better, though I find it's often not strictly necessary, at least for small projects. The most important thing is to keep the code simple to understand and follow, then you can write great software in dynamically typed languages as well.

Also have Typescript experience but in general I'm not a big fan of gradually typed programming languages, static typing works best in languages that were designed for it from the ground up and that offer an expressive type system, e.g. C++ or Rust.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#194

Post by hu3 »

staticassertion wrote: post #155
gwbas1c wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI: If you're primarily IO-heavy, the GC pauses aren't going to be a big deal. Something like NodeJS (or Async .Net) will have great performance; even with garbage collection. (IO-heavy is the specific use case that NodeJS was designed to handle.) GC pauses really become a problem when you have long-lived objects in RAM. A generational GC (which pretty much all of them are) is designed to collect short-lived objects…

> FYI: If you're primarily IO-heavy, the GC pauses aren't going to be a big deal. Something like NodeJS (or Async .Net) will have great performance; even with garbage collection. (IO-heavy is the specific use case that NodeJS was designed to handle.) This just isn't true. Node is pretty terrible even at IO heavy workloads, especially if you have servers with many cores. Any benchmark will confirm this.

Their point is that GC is fine. Your're focusing on one of the suggestions: nodejs.

But .NET or Go are very fast for typical I/O bound workloads.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#195

Post by Curious_Furious »

synergy20 wrote: post #188
spaintech wrote: post #74

Startups are about cost, time to market, and a high level of efficiency to deliver on a promises ( product ) to sell or get to market. A language selection should consider two things, talent pool and maturity of the tools. When you go hire developers, I want a strong pool to be able to be selective in finding attitude with the right aptitude, and I want them to be productive ASAP, so that means that we might bring in…

Exactly, I did startup before, and my take is: Rust is absolutely the worst choice for startups. to survive startup, you need a large pool of talents, mature and verified and boring stack, easy to find tutorials, etc. The least thing you want is to spend cycles on fancy new bleeding unstable languages to build your earth shaking product.

>you need a large pool of talents

Forgive me if I'm quoting you out of context but the article mentions receiving 4000 applicants over 8 weeks time. I've hired (primarily) for Java and DBA positions, and we would be absolutely thrilled if we got even 40 applicants.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#196

Post by smolder »

gwbas1c wrote: post #139
strken wrote: 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…

FYI: If you're primarily IO-heavy, the GC pauses aren't going to be a big deal. Something like NodeJS (or Async .Net) will have great performance; even with garbage collection. (IO-heavy is the specific use case that NodeJS was designed to handle.) GC pauses really become a problem when you have long-lived objects in RAM. A generational GC (which pretty much all of them are) is designed to collect short-lived objects…

I don't necessarily agree. Depending on what kind of IO they're doing, the latency and consistency of latency from a rust service can be so much better while requiring so much less in terms of computing resources that it actually sets their business apart, attracting customers based on quality or saving them enough money on infra bills to hire more salespeople. It can be a big difference in performance. I have done comparisons across rust, node, java, c# and strongly believe rust is worth it for performance-criticial code, and rust is subjectively very enjoyable to write, for me. I really want a job doing it and so admittedly the "it's too hard" attitude is a thorn in my side.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#197

Post by staticassertion »

hu3 wrote: post #194
staticassertion wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FYI: If you're primarily IO-heavy, the GC pauses aren't going to be a big deal. Something like NodeJS (or Async .Net) will have great performance; even with garbage collection. (IO-heavy is the specific use case that NodeJS was designed to handle.) This just isn't true. Node is pretty terrible even at IO heavy workloads, especially if you have servers with many cores. Any benchmark will confirm this.

Their point is that GC is fine. Your're focusing on one of the suggestions: nodejs. But .NET or Go are very fast for typical I/O bound workloads.

Yes, that's why I quoted one specific part and responded to that specific part.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#199

Post by linkdd »

Curious_Furious wrote: post #195
synergy20 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, I did startup before, and my take is: Rust is absolutely the worst choice for startups. to survive startup, you need a large pool of talents, mature and verified and boring stack, easy to find tutorials, etc. The least thing you want is to spend cycles on fancy new bleeding unstable languages to build your earth shaking product.

>you need a large pool of talents Forgive me if I'm quoting you out of context but the article mentions receiving 4000 applicants over 8 weeks time. I've hired (primarily) for Java and DBA positions, and we would be absolutely thrilled if we got even 40 applicants.

"pool of talents" vs "pool of people who jumped on the hype train 2 weeks ago"

Many people are searching for Rust jobs, but few have a really strong experience with it.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#200

Post by synergy20 »

Curious_Furious wrote: post #195
synergy20 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, I did startup before, and my take is: Rust is absolutely the worst choice for startups. to survive startup, you need a large pool of talents, mature and verified and boring stack, easy to find tutorials, etc. The least thing you want is to spend cycles on fancy new bleeding unstable languages to build your earth shaking product.

>you need a large pool of talents Forgive me if I'm quoting you out of context but the article mentions receiving 4000 applicants over 8 weeks time. I've hired (primarily) for Java and DBA positions, and we would be absolutely thrilled if we got even 40 applicants.

"Many didn’t actually have Rust experience at all and that’s fine, they were just interested in the idea" -- to me, that's _not_ fine. startup needs to move fast to stay above the water, it's not the best place to learn 'coding in Rust 101' IMHO
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