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Migrating from Go to Rust

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Re: Migrating from Go to Rust

#11

Post by logicchains »

gertlabs wrote: post #3

I liked Rust before running a benchmark, but the gap between how effectively most LLMs write in Rust vs Go was still surprisingly large to me (especially in agentic harnesses where they can fix the initial environment issues). I've become a pretty big Rust evangelist after seeing that. We've had a lot of success writing batch processing tools in Rust to be called by our existing codebase, but haven't attempted a full…

The weakness of Rust WRT LLMs is compilation times. LLMs code faster and hence spend relatively more time waiting for compilation than humans do, so on reasonably sized projects (e.g. 100k+ lines) Rust's ~10x slower compilation starts showing up as a bottleneck. If you're writing some critical infrastructure it makes sense to pay that cost, but if you're writing some internal service that's not publicly exposed to the internet then development velocity may be a bigger concern. (I'd argue that slow compilation also influences human development velocity, but for some reason developers very rarely try to quantify this.)

Re: Migrating from Go to Rust

#13

Post by OtomotO »

amusingimpala75 wrote: post #2

This is probably going to sound generic / repetitive, but my biggest complaint about Rust is the package management situation, which is entirely the result of the developer mindset. I love the ergonomics on the rust side (the functional approach to data types is beautiful), but I’m working on two projects side by side, one in rust and one in go at the moment. The dependency trees are entirely different beasts, with m…

The stdlib is the place where good ideas go to die.

And then you have httplib3 followed by httplib4.

In other words: I highly prefer the Rust approach.

It doesn't matter a lot whether I rely on the stdlib or another dependency to me.

It's a dependency after all.

People think just because it's the stdlib it's somehow better quality or better maintained, but these are orthogonal concepts.

In the end it depends solely on resources.

Sure, the stdlib may get more of these, but it may also grow fat and unmaintainable...

Re: Migrating from Go to Rust

#15

Post by iknowstuff »

Animats wrote: post #6

I could see migrating from C or C++ or Python to Rust, for various reasons, but for web back-end work Go is a good match. I write almost entirely in Rust, but the last time I had to do something web server side in Rust, I now wish I'd used Go. The OP points out the wordyness of Go's error syntax. That's a good point. Rust started with the same problem, and added the "?" syntax, which just does a return with an error…

Rust does not have three error systems. It has one: the Error trait. io::Error is one of many that implement it (nothing special about it). Errors defined via thiserror also implement it.

“Anyhow” just allows you to conveniently say “some Error” if you don’t care to write out an API contract specifying types of errors your function might spit out.

Re: Migrating from Go to Rust

#16

Post by lionkor »

Animats wrote: post #6

I could see migrating from C or C++ or Python to Rust, for various reasons, but for web back-end work Go is a good match. I write almost entirely in Rust, but the last time I had to do something web server side in Rust, I now wish I'd used Go. The OP points out the wordyness of Go's error syntax. That's a good point. Rust started with the same problem, and added the "?" syntax, which just does a return with an error…

> Rust lacks a uniform error type

Rust has practically one error, it's the Error trait. The things you've listed are some common ways to use it, but you're entirely fine with just Box (which is basically what anyhow::Error is) and similar.

Re: Migrating from Go to Rust

#17

Post by OtomotO »

amazingamazing wrote: post #7

Rust is great. However in an agentic world go will win. Look no further than incremental build times. This, combined with high token costs mean that for a given application it simply will cost more to to write it in Rust than Go. This can easily be justified for many usecases, but for your vanilla crud app, do you really need Rust? Per the article, you are getting 20-50% better more performance with Rust. Not worth i…

It's a good thing then, that the AI hype is dying outside of ycombinator, the silicon valley and the US

Re: Migrating from Go to Rust

#18

Post by johnfn »

amazingamazing wrote: post #7

Rust is great. However in an agentic world go will win. Look no further than incremental build times. This, combined with high token costs mean that for a given application it simply will cost more to to write it in Rust than Go. This can easily be justified for many usecases, but for your vanilla crud app, do you really need Rust? Per the article, you are getting 20-50% better more performance with Rust. Not worth i…

Can you explain a bit about why token costs would favor Go and not Rust?

Re: Migrating from Go to Rust

#19

Post by amazingamazing »

johnfn wrote: post #18
amazingamazing wrote: post #7

Rust is great. However in an agentic world go will win. Look no further than incremental build times. This, combined with high token costs mean that for a given application it simply will cost more to to write it in Rust than Go. This can easily be justified for many usecases, but for your vanilla crud app, do you really need Rust? Per the article, you are getting 20-50% better more performance with Rust. Not worth i…

Can you explain a bit about why token costs would favor Go and not Rust?

Go is more verbose, but Rust have more complex syntax which in practice require more tokens.

The big thing though is because builds are slower, you will end up waiting longer as tests are modified, rebuilt and run. This difference piles up fast.

Re: Migrating from Go to Rust

#20

Post by fatty_patty89 »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #4
amusingimpala75 wrote: post #2

This is probably going to sound generic / repetitive, but my biggest complaint about Rust is the package management situation, which is entirely the result of the developer mindset. I love the ergonomics on the rust side (the functional approach to data types is beautiful), but I’m working on two projects side by side, one in rust and one in go at the moment. The dependency trees are entirely different beasts, with m…

Interesting. I'm not very familiar with Go. What is the equivalent for Tauri in Go's stdlib? Would it make sense to continue using Go for the frontend and doing only the backend in Rust for your user case?

wails, there's wails3-alpha which some people said is even better than tauri
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