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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

#201

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…

>Yeah, everyone wants to be a Rust programmer I understand why you might have got that impression, but that's a far cry from the reality

It really puzzles me why smart people want to spend their time satisfying the borrow checker rather than inventing new and useful things.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#202

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.

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Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed.

My experience (15+ years of debugging legacy C code) is that if the segfault is repeatable - as in you can make it happen in the same place over and over again - the fact that the error is somewhere else only makes things marginally more difficult. Even the old-fashioned debuggers can monitor memory locations for changes, and if that doesn't work you can set breakpoints in various locations and manually check memory for corruption - it can really narrow down the possibilities.

I always enjoyed the mystery. It's a puzzle with an as-yet unknown solution. How can you not love it?

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#204
Rust is not a great choice for startups!

In fact, NO LANGUAGE is a great choice for startups! You don't choose languages depending on whether you're a startup! You choose languages based of the problem you're trying to solve, how fit the language is for solving that particular problem, the ecosystem supporting that language, and the availability of developers who are experienced with that language.

Rust just may be the best choice for your startup, but it's not necessarily the best choice for all startups - in fact it's probably not the best choice for most startups! That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Rust, it just means Rust isn't the right tool for the job most startups are trying to tackle. If it is the right tool then absolutely you should use it!

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, everyone wants to be a Rust programmer I understand why you might have got that impression, but that's a far cry from the reality

It really puzzles me why smart people want to spend their time satisfying the borrow checker rather than inventing new and useful things.

I don't remember the 'satisfying the borrow checker' phase lasting more than a few weeks. Once you internalize the rules the borrow checker gets out of your way and it's more of a sanity check.

I think part of the issue is that it wasn't very well explained in the book at the time I started learning rust. This might have improved since.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#207
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No you included the GC part too:

> FYI: If you're primarily IO-heavy, the GC pauses aren't going to be a big deal.

To further my point: .NET and Java are amazing when it comes to performance for most cases. You get a mature ecosystem, large developer pool, fast runtime and all the comfort that GC offers.

I'd argue that choosing Rust for most startups is outright irresponsible.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#208
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like most languages that are UNIX first, like Rust.

No, not really. Rust undoubtedly started on *nix, but all Tier 1 platforms are supported equally[1]. To quote from OCaml's main site[2] A gentle reminder that if you do not need Windows binaries, then a more stable option is to use WSL2 , ie when on Windows it is better to use OCaml from within a Linux VM. Ocaml is great, but its Windows support sucks, and that makes adoption hard in a lot of contexts. [1] https://do…

Any language that calls themselves systems programming language, on Windows, must have first class support for COM and WinRT, in their various workloads.

Rust support for them is pretty much WIP.

And then there is the whole matter that Windows shops love to ship binary libraries.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed.

My experience (15+ years of debugging legacy C code) is that if the segfault is repeatable - as in you can make it happen in the same place over and over again - the fact that the error is somewhere else only makes things marginally more difficult. Even the old-fashioned debuggers can monitor memory locations for changes, and if that doesn't work you can set breakpoints in various locations and manually check memory…

In cases when I have a working visual debugger, I agree, it's fun. Without one, it's not fun.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#210

What matters for a startup is time to market. So, go with a boring technology that the existing team is already familiar with, and that fits your use case. There's nothing wrong with PHP, Python, Go, JavaScript or Java. Even modern "no code" tools such as Bubble can get a first version done in a minimum amount of time.

Time to market is important if you have an idea that replicates existing solutions. Or is easy to replicate by others.
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