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Removed rust to gain speed

prisma.io

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Re: Removed rust to gain speed

#11

Post by satvikpendem »

thunky wrote: post #6
baranul wrote: post #2

This is a decent example of not buying, getting pulled, or being forced into any corporate pushed hype or eliminating one's options. They re-evaluated and looked at what programming language was best for their situation, which was removing the Rust language and using something else. It then turned out, they actually got gains in greater user contributions, simplicity, efficiency, and even speed.

> This is a decent example of not buying, getting pulled, or being forced into any corporate pushed hype It seems that maybe they did get hyped into Rust, because it's not clear why they believed Rust would make their JavaScript tool easier to develop, simpler, or more efficient in the first place.

There are examples where that's true, like Biome or oxc.

Re: Removed rust to gain speed

#12

Post by ameliaquining »

An important part of the story here, not mentioned in this post but noted elsewhere (https://www.prisma.io/blog/from-rust-to-typescript-a-new-cha...), is that they gave up on offering client libraries for languages other than JavaScript/TypeScript. Doing this while mostly sharing a single implementation among all languages was much of the original reason to use Rust, because Rust is a good "lowest common denominator" language for FFI and TypeScript is not; it wasn't entirely about performance. If they hadn't tried to do this, they would likely never have used Rust; if they hadn't given up on it, they would likely still be using Rust.

Re: Removed rust to gain speed

#13

Post by hresvelgr »

I'm sure you could get even greater speed by removing Prisma. All you need is a migration tool and a database connection. Most recent example in my work where we removed an ORM resulted in all of our engineers, particularly juniors becoming Postgres wizards.

Re: Removed rust to gain speed

#14

Post by amluto »

quotemstr wrote: post #9

Good. Rust is fine, but it makes you pay a complexity tax for manual memory management that you just don't need most of the time. In almost all real world cases, a GC is fine. TypeScript is a memory-safe language, just like Rust, and I can't imagine a database ORM of all things needing manual memory management to get good performance. (Talking to the database, not memory management, is the bottleneck!)

I don’t think the problems they were dealing with had much to do with any of those properties of Rust. Their issue seems to have been that they weren’t using native JavaScript/TypeScript and that their situation was improved by using native TypeScript.

If they had been using something like Java or Go or Haskell, etc, they may well have had even more downsides.

Re: Removed rust to gain speed

#15

Post by theusus »

quotemstr wrote: post #9

Good. Rust is fine, but it makes you pay a complexity tax for manual memory management that you just don't need most of the time. In almost all real world cases, a GC is fine. TypeScript is a memory-safe language, just like Rust, and I can't imagine a database ORM of all things needing manual memory management to get good performance. (Talking to the database, not memory management, is the bottleneck!)

> manual memory management

Rust has automatic memory management.

> Complexity tax

Could you be more specific?

Re: Removed rust to gain speed

#16

Post by koakuma-chan »

satvikpendem wrote: post #11
thunky wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a decent example of not buying, getting pulled, or being forced into any corporate pushed hype It seems that maybe they did get hyped into Rust, because it's not clear why they believed Rust would make their JavaScript tool easier to develop, simpler, or more efficient in the first place.

There are examples where that's true, like Biome or oxc.

Biome and oxc are developer tools. I don't know why in the world they would do this, but it sounds like they were using Rust at runtime to interact with the database?

Re: Removed rust to gain speed

#17

Post by honeycrispy »

theusus wrote: post #15
quotemstr wrote: post #9

Good. Rust is fine, but it makes you pay a complexity tax for manual memory management that you just don't need most of the time. In almost all real world cases, a GC is fine. TypeScript is a memory-safe language, just like Rust, and I can't imagine a database ORM of all things needing manual memory management to get good performance. (Talking to the database, not memory management, is the bottleneck!)

> manual memory management Rust has automatic memory management. > Complexity tax Could you be more specific?

The trait/type system can get pretty complex. Advanced Rust doesn't inherit like typical OOP, you build on generics with trait constraints, and that is a much more complex and unusual thing to model in the mind. Granted you get used to it.

Re: Removed rust to gain speed

#18

Post by quotemstr »

theusus wrote: post #15
quotemstr wrote: post #9

Good. Rust is fine, but it makes you pay a complexity tax for manual memory management that you just don't need most of the time. In almost all real world cases, a GC is fine. TypeScript is a memory-safe language, just like Rust, and I can't imagine a database ORM of all things needing manual memory management to get good performance. (Talking to the database, not memory management, is the bottleneck!)

> manual memory management Rust has automatic memory management. > Complexity tax Could you be more specific?

> Rust has automatic memory management

Sure, if you define "automatic memory management" in a bespoke way.

> Could you be more specific?

The lifetime system, one of the most complex and challenging parts of the Rust programming model, exists only so that Rust can combine manual memory management with memory safety. Relax the requirement to manage memory manually and you can safely delete lifetimes and end up with a much simpler language.

Have you ever written a Java or Python program?

Re: Removed rust to gain speed

#19

Post by solidsnack9000 »

thunky wrote: post #6
baranul wrote: post #2

This is a decent example of not buying, getting pulled, or being forced into any corporate pushed hype or eliminating one's options. They re-evaluated and looked at what programming language was best for their situation, which was removing the Rust language and using something else. It then turned out, they actually got gains in greater user contributions, simplicity, efficiency, and even speed.

> This is a decent example of not buying, getting pulled, or being forced into any corporate pushed hype It seems that maybe they did get hyped into Rust, because it's not clear why they believed Rust would make their JavaScript tool easier to develop, simpler, or more efficient in the first place.

At one time, they were targeting much a broader array of languages -- it wasn't specifically a JavaScript tool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zSh0zYLTIE

Re: Removed rust to gain speed

#20

Post by PaulRobinson »

hresvelgr wrote: post #13

I'm sure you could get even greater speed by removing Prisma. All you need is a migration tool and a database connection. Most recent example in my work where we removed an ORM resulted in all of our engineers, particularly juniors becoming Postgres wizards.

Congratulations, you have now increased the cognitive load to be productive on your team and increased the SQL injection attack surface for your apps!

I jest, but ORMs exist for a reason. And if I were a new senior or principal on your team I’d be worried that there was now an expectation for a junior to be a wizard at anything, even more so that thing being a rich and complex RDBMS toolchain that has more potential guns pointing at feet than anything else in the stack.

I spent many years cutting Rails apps and while ActiveRecord was rarely my favourite part of those apps, it gave us so much batteries included functionality, we just realised it was best to embrace it. If AR was slow or we had to jump through hoops, that suggested the data model was wrong, not that we should dump AR - we’d go apply some DDD and CQRS style thinking and consider a view model and how to populate it asynchronously.

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