A year of Rust in ClickHouse
clickhouse.com
A year of Rust in ClickHouse
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Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse
#2I love this. We are a rust shop and we use clickhouse a fair bit. We’ve been quite impressed with its speed and flexibility. I’m glad to see this kind of direct, real-world feedback around both the benefits and difficulties of mixing rust and C++, which we have also had to do a bit of (albeit in the opposite direction: a smattering of C++ in a sea of rust).
I’m not sure if the poster here is the post author, but it would be great if the author would consider filling out this survey that was recently released asking for feedback on the future of rust’s vision: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/04/04/vision-doc-survey.html
I’d love to see rust become the de facto standard for cross-language portable code by virtue of its ease of use, but as this and our experience highlights, there’s some way to go yet!
Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse
#3I love this. We are a rust shop and we use clickhouse a fair bit. We’ve been quite impressed with its speed and flexibility. I’m glad to see this kind of direct, real-world feedback around both the benefits and difficulties of mixing rust and C++, which we have also had to do a bit of (albeit in the opposite direction: a smattering of C++ in a sea of rust). I’m not sure if the poster here is the post author, but it w…
Oh one more note, regarding hermetic builds: I have tried to package clickhouse in nix for our dev environment and CI, but its build is pretty complicated, so I resorted to just pulling the precompiled binaries.
Nix, via the standard rust integration or via something like crane, is actually quite nice for building rust/C++ combo projects, so it’d be awesome if the team might consider this as a means of achieving reproducibility. I’d imagine they’d have an easier time of it than I did, given they are more familiar with their own build process.
Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse
#4This guy seems to be both very positive about Rust and unfairly cynical about it at the same time...
Rust is a really fantastic language but having worked on a mixed C++/Rust codebase I can see why they had so many issues. Rust just wasn't really designed with C++ interop in mind so it's kind of painful to use them together. Impressive that they made it work.
Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse
#5> If you do an experiment and say "C++" anywhere on the Internet, in a minute someone will chime in and educate you about the existence of Rust.
Many people see this as a problem. The response to TypeScript choosing Go over Rust was pretty gross imho, no one should be abused for choosing a language.
Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse
#6I love that it goes both ways, about plus and minus of both languages, including rewriting back into C++ when it made sense, and the side joke about rewriting existing CLI tools in Rust.
While C++ isn't perfect, has the warts of a 50 year's old language, and probably will never match Rust's safety, we would already be in a much better place if at least everyone used the tools at their disposal from the last 30 years.
While I would advise to use Rust for some security critical scenarios, there are many others where it is still getting there, and there are other requirements to take into account other than affine types.
Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse
#7This guy seems to be both very positive about Rust and unfairly cynical about it at the same time... Rust is a really fantastic language but having worked on a mixed C++/Rust codebase I can see why they had so many issues. Rust just wasn't really designed with C++ interop in mind so it's kind of painful to use them together. Impressive that they made it work.
"unfairly"? A lot of issues are obvious deficiencies of Rust, including immaturity of the ecosystem, integration issues, complexity, monomorphization bloat, supply chain issues. Now, all languages have issues, and Rust is certainly a nice language overall. The main issue with Rust is that is has been oversold as a panacea for safety using exaggerated arguments. So a bit of cynicism seems entirely fair.
Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse
#8> If you do an experiment and say "C++" anywhere on the Internet, in a minute someone will chime in and educate you about the existence of Rust. Many people see this as a problem. The response to TypeScript choosing Go over Rust was pretty gross imho, no one should be abused for choosing a language.
The actual issue wasn't Go over Rust, rather having key people responsible for C# design, on a Microsoft project, going for a Google language.
While at the same time, the .NET team routinely talks about .NET image problem outside traditional Microsoft shops, which naturally decisions like this aren't helping a tiny bit.
Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse
#9This guy seems to be both very positive about Rust and unfairly cynical about it at the same time... Rust is a really fantastic language but having worked on a mixed C++/Rust codebase I can see why they had so many issues. Rust just wasn't really designed with C++ interop in mind so it's kind of painful to use them together. Impressive that they made it work.
"unfairly"? A lot of issues are obvious deficiencies of Rust, including immaturity of the ecosystem, integration issues, complexity, monomorphization bloat, supply chain issues. Now, all languages have issues, and Rust is certainly a nice language overall. The main issue with Rust is that is has been oversold as a panacea for safety using exaggerated arguments. So a bit of cynicism seems entirely fair.
Yes. I was thinking of this:
> If you do an experiment and say "C++" anywhere on the Internet, in a minute someone will chime in and educate you about the existence of Rust.
> I know examples when engineers rewrite code from Rust in Rust if they like to rewrite everything in Rust.
> our engineers become too nauseous from Rust poisoning
> So now they [Rust devs] can write something other than new versions of old terminal applications.
> someone shows PRQL, everyone else thinks "What a wonderful idea, and, also, Rust" and gives this project a star on GitHub. This is, by the way, how most of Rust projects get their stars on GitHub. It doesn't look like someone wants to use this language, but what we want is to ride the hype.
> we started to understand that it would be hard to get rid of Rust, and we could tolerate it.
It's a very shitty attitude and not even accurate. You see this attitude from old C/C++ devs quite a lot, it's just very weird that he has that attitude and then also seems to be simultaneously quite keen to use Rust. Very weird!
Anyway those are just the non-technical things. On the technical side:
> Fully offline builds
They solved it by vendoring but this is the obvious solution and also applies to C++.
> Segfault in Rust
They tried to do a null-terminated read of a string that wasn't null-terminated. Nothing to do with Rust. That would be an error in C++ too. In fact this is a strong argument for Rust.
> Panic
C/C++ code aborts. Or more commonly it crashes in a very difficult to debug way. I'll take panics any day.
> Sanitizers require nightly
Ok fair enough but this seems relatively minor.
> Rust's OpenSSL links with the system library by default and you have to set an environment variable to statically link it.
They set the environment variable. Frankly this is a million times easier than doing the same thing in C++.
I'll stop there, but overall it seems like a lot of "this is a problem we had with Rust" where it should really be more like "this is something we had to do when using C++ with Rust".
Weird vibe anyway.
Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse
#10> If you do an experiment and say "C++" anywhere on the Internet, in a minute someone will chime in and educate you about the existence of Rust. Many people see this as a problem. The response to TypeScript choosing Go over Rust was pretty gross imho, no one should be abused for choosing a language.
> no one should be abused for choosing a language
Can you link to the abuse?