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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

#11

Post by yupis »

"Rust has made the decision that safety is more important than developer productivity. This is the right tradeoff to make in many situations — like building code in an OS kernel, or for memory-constrained embedded systems — but I don’t think it’s the right tradeoff in all cases, especially not in startups where velocity is crucial"

Great point

Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale

#12

Post by ilyt »

arcticbull wrote: post #6
paulddraper wrote: post #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 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 Ru…

Right, but you're company that needs to hire people to write that. It's entirely fine if you're already a team that knows Rust, but if you have a need for an app you need to hire more devs to build, picking the "obvious" stack usually comes with benefit of being able to recruit people more easily.

Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale

#14

Post by ahungry »

I've noticed that Rust is in an interesting spot - it has a lot of overlapping appeal with various groups.

- C/C++ developers like it as an alternative for low level languages

- Functional programmers like it because of it's functional features

- "Cargo Culters" / "Hot Language" / "Flavor of the Month" followers like it, as it's in vogue at the moment (this is the crowd that has likely shifted from various web/API scripting languages over the last decade - (php|ruby|python) -> nodejs -> rust)

However, as the article alludes to, for the third crowd, Rust is just likely not a great fit (even if it has a lot of neat features and introduces some great concepts others may not stumble on of their own accord) when your implementation doesn't do much beyond web dev/API/scripting purposes.

Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale

#15

Post by 63 »

There's a reason why we see so many articles like "we rewrote x in rust." Rust makes sense when you've scaled to the point that you're seriously considering performance. Sure, starting with rust can potentially save you time, money, and refactoring down the line but only after you've reached a point that few startups ever hit. Otherwise you're limiting yourself with slow development times (compared to, say, Python) and difficulty hiring for very little benefit. I'm sure this startup's founders love rust (and so do I), but ultimately you need to prioritize the company first and that probably means using the most popular, boring tech stack imaginable in the beginning. The more you deviate from that, the harder the early days will be. It's far too easy to be swayed by exciting tech and forget that all that really matters is that you solve someone's problem.

Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale

#17

Post by ravi-delia »

bsder wrote: post #8

I 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.

Rust does have some nice semantics that the last round of popular languages don't, mostly just due to age. I suspect that a decent amount of its popularity is owed to that. But obviously for something CRUDesq all the nice little affordances in the world can't prevent borrowing from putting it way behind any language with a mature framework. That indicates we could use a GC language with Rust's eye towards modern design but without Rust's more difficult bits. Though I haven't really tried Typescript- does it do anything like that?

Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale

#18

Post by codazoda »

brundolf wrote: post #13

OT, but I thought it was neat how all the splash images were just casually generated by dall-e and the author didn't feel the need to mention it because it's just normal now (Not /s, I genuinely think it's cool things are like this now)

It credits Dall-E under the very first image, and probably did when you wrote this, since HN tells me that was 3 minutes ago.

Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale

#19

Post by saurik »

yupis wrote: post #11

"Rust has made the decision that safety is more important than developer productivity. This is the right tradeoff to make in many situations — like building code in an OS kernel, or for memory-constrained embedded systems — but I don’t think it’s the right tradeoff in all cases, especially not in startups where velocity is crucial" Great point

The problem is that, while the benefits of trading safety vs. velocity go to the company, the costs go to the user, as it is the user whose data or identity will be stolen. And this goes well beyond Rust and "mere" memory safety: this extends to every kind of taking things slow and being careful in your coding rather than just throwing something together and later finding out you've made a serious error. This is why we need regulation: startups that take the time or put in the effort to play it safe hate at a disadvantage to ones that, frankly, "don't give a shit", and so the world remains an insecure mess. (I do think the calculus works out differently for large companies that are operating at a fundamentally different economy of scale--and so I do feel like colonies the like of Google or Apple are willing to take things a bit more slowly to ensure a more reasonable result, even though they sometimes do fail--but I almost feel that makes the problem worse, not better :/.)

Re: Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale

#20

Post by barakm »

arcticbull wrote: post #7
charcircuit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's not an entirely new idea. C++ has ownership too.

C++ doesn't have a Rust-like ownership/borrow system.

I think you meant “borrow checker” because sure it does. It’s called a const reference. Want a mut borrow? That’s a pointer.

That Rust can check these somewhat more explicitly (rather than via good coding style) and that C++ also allows you to do arbitrary permutations (a la non-const references) is what you’re talking about. But ownership is very very real in C++! Just look at the craziness that is move semantics!

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