Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
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Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
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Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
#2> With Rust, though, one needs to learn entirely new ideas — things like lifetimes, ownership, and the borrow checker.
Those three things are actually just different facets of the same thing: ownership. The bad news is that you must learn Rust's ownership model to use Rust idiomatically. The good news is that you can do a lot without learning Rust ownership model at all. Just clone all your values. Not advisable for production code, but great for getting over the ownership model hump.
Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
#3Interesting. By contrast, I wish I had used less Python and more Rust for my company's product because Rust is considerably more productive. We were building gRPC and web services.
I just haven't found it to be the case that developers have a very hard time learning it, but we haven't grown to the point where that would maybe be the case. We also lean heavily into microservices so "oh there's no library in Rust but there's one in Python" is low cost, we can just write a service in Python.
Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
#4> With Rust, though, one needs to learn entirely new ideas — things like lifetimes, ownership, and the borrow checker. Those three things are actually just different facets of the same thing: ownership. The bad news is that you must learn Rust's ownership model to use Rust idiomatically. The good news is that you can do a lot without learning Rust ownership model at all. Just clone all your values. Not advisable for…
And it's not an entirely new idea. C++ has ownership too.
Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
#5> Rust is awesome, for certain things.
> This project was a cloud-based SaaS product that is, more-or-less, a conventional CRUD app: it is a set of microservices that provide a REST and gRPC API endpoint in front of a database, as well as some other back-end microservices
Of course.
Use Java/Kotlin or Node.js/Typescript or Go or Python for your basic web services.
Easy test: Would you at least seriously consider using C/C++ for it? Only then should you use Rust.
Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
#6> Rust is awesome, for certain things. > This project was a cloud-based SaaS product that is, more-or-less, a conventional CRUD app: it is a set of microservices that provide a REST and gRPC API endpoint in front of a database, as well as some other back-end microservices Of course. Use Java/Kotlin or Node.js/Typescript or Go or Python for your basic web services. Easy test: Would you at least seriously consider usin…
The difference between C++ and Rust here is that Rust has a large variety of easily-accessible third-party libraries you can drop in with a one-line change to your Cargo.toml. I think the assessment is no longer that straight-forward. There's some solid crates for building these types of endpoints now, but an honest self-assessment is required to see if it really meets your needs from a staffing perspective.
I'm a Rust-stan for sure, but I probably wouldn't use it for this task either as it'll be hard to find other people who know how to use it - and also for this task. Here's hoping that changes, though.
[edit] I might also add it's not a good fit for making these types of endpoints at a startup as the goal of a startup isn't really to write perfect/correct/safe code, but rather to ship a product as fast as you can so you can iterate on the product-market fit. Quick and dirty in another language is probably a better fit for the business case. Rewrite it later.
Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
#7> With Rust, though, one needs to learn entirely new ideas — things like lifetimes, ownership, and the borrow checker. Those three things are actually just different facets of the same thing: ownership. The bad news is that you must learn Rust's ownership model to use Rust idiomatically. The good news is that you can do a lot without learning Rust ownership model at all. Just clone all your values. Not advisable for…
And it's not an entirely new idea. C++ has ownership too.
C++ doesn't have a Rust-like ownership/borrow system.
Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
#8I really, really, really, don't understand why people want to use Rust for CRUD/web stuff. Every GC language is better than Rust for CRUD/web when you are in the less than 10,000 users phase.
I understand why Rust is trying to shove its way into the CRUD/web space--that's where all the programming is. I just don't understand the converse.
Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
#9> My primary experience from Rust comes from working with it for a little more than 2 years at a previous startup. This project was a cloud-based SaaS product that is, more-or-less, a conventional CRUD app
I think this should be at the top of the post. Rust seems like an obvious bad choice for this. For something not performance-sensitive that doesn't require most of Rust's power just use languages/frameworks that are made for this kind of thing. Of course you can do this with Rust, but you're probably picking the wrong tool for the job. The Rust ecosystem around building typical webservices isn't nearly as good as it is for other languages, and the benefit you get from Rust's safety and performance is worth less than the iteration speed you gain from the standard Node/Python/etc approach.
Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
#10Interesting. By contrast, I wish I had used less Python and more Rust for my company's product because Rust is considerably more productive. We were building gRPC and web services. I just haven't found it to be the case that developers have a very hard time learning it, but we haven't grown to the point where that would maybe be the case. We also lean heavily into microservices so "oh there's no library in Rust but t…
I think that most of why Rust is popular is just that it's a very modern programming language. It has all the nice things people want and surprisingly little of what they don't. So it's no surprise that for some people it's more productive.
But the article pretty clearly outlined a super simple CRUD app. These days that's a problem space so well defined you can practically specify the whole thing in command line flags. Rust really has little to add there. For other stuff, yeah Rust can be super cool.