Rust – A hard decision pays off • Hacker News Board

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#31

Post by tialaramex » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #7

Maybe it’s just me but it seems irresponsible to move your entire team to a programming language none of them knows. Rust is great, but modern C++ is great too.

Search your heart, do you think this story ends similarly if they decide to all do "modern C++" instead?

My guess is that even with initial discipline in the form of code review and style enforcement by one or two people, the C++ descends into a riot of different opinions about, as usual, which are the good bits.

A similar piece of software could be written in C++ but I doubt it gets written successfully, in similar time, by this team. I reckon the post mortem of such an attempt would be written off as "Don't do rewrites, duh"

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#32

Post by gk1 » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

haskellandchill wrote: post #29

so how are graphs used for vector search?

See: https://www.pinecone.io/learn/hnsw/

Although our graph-based vector index does not use HNSW, the concept is similar.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#33

Post by draw_down » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

moonchrome wrote: post #16

mhaberl wrote: post #10

> ..complex runtime issues which were almost impossible to reproduce or isolate > That’s when internal murmurs about a complete rewrite started brewing… > We decided to move our entire codebase to Rust > there was still one minor problem - no one on the team knew Rust "We have runtime issues so we will fix them by a complete rewrite in a language that no one on the team knows." I would not call that a "hard decision"…

I mean when the tools you know are failing you, you might as well roll the dice.

No post body was provided.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#34

Post by benreesman » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #31

endisneigh wrote: post #7

Maybe it’s just me but it seems irresponsible to move your entire team to a programming language none of them knows. Rust is great, but modern C++ is great too.

Search your heart, do you think this story ends similarly if they decide to all do "modern C++" instead? My guess is that even with initial discipline in the form of code review and style enforcement by one or two people, the C++ descends into a riot of different opinions about, as usual, which are the good bits. A similar piece of software could be written in C++ but I doubt it gets written successfully, in similar…

You might want to take that up with the authors of RocksDB and FAISS. They seem to have shipped some cool stuff.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#35

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

throwaway642012 wrote: post #9

I don't want to be dismissive but how much of this success belongs to the team of rock solid senior engineers with enough experience under their belt rather than rewrite in Rust?

[deleted]

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#36

Post by benreesman » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 2:16 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #13

endisneigh wrote: post #7

Maybe it’s just me but it seems irresponsible to move your entire team to a programming language none of them knows. Rust is great, but modern C++ is great too.

> modern C++ is great Great in the way that Alexander the Great was great. Achieved big things and killed a lot of people. Though in the case of C++ they're just dead inside.

There are better threads to trash C++ hackers on than this one. It’s literally about insanely successful software written in C++, maintained successfully for a decade, that seems to have survived a port to another language.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#37

Post by pas » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 2:18 PM UTC

ramoz wrote: post #12

> Simultaneous fetches of thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of objects started becoming inefficient, especially when fetching from collections of tens of millions of objects Why not try leveldb. We're doing random reads of 170,000 vectors (/130M) a second. No startup needed.

Isn't RocksDB a fork (reimplementation) of LevelDB? :o

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#38

Post by ncmncm » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #20

> Dev velocity, which was supposed to be the claim to fame of Python, improved dramatically with Rust. Built-in testing, CI/CD, benchmarking, and an overzealous compiler increased engineers’ confidence in pushing changes, and enabled them to work on the same code sections and contribute simultaneously without breaking the code base. Most impressively though, real time operational events dropped almost to zero overnig…

Using Rc unnecessarily is a code smell commonly called Java Disease.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#39

Post by diarrhea » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #30

endisneigh wrote: post #7

Maybe it’s just me but it seems irresponsible to move your entire team to a programming language none of them knows. Rust is great, but modern C++ is great too.

Yes. This comes across as "we are so smart, this project wasn't hard enough to demand our full attention". Coding in a manifestly immature language signals that you are not really serious about being used where long-term support across a variety of platforms may be important. The language is still more likely than not to fizzle. If it does, it makes your flagship project a niche player.

> The language is still more likely than not to fizzle.

What makes you think that?

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#40

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

throwaway642012 wrote: post #9

I don't want to be dismissive but how much of this success belongs to the team of rock solid senior engineers with enough experience under their belt rather than rewrite in Rust?

[deleted]