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Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

blog.meilisearch.com

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Re: Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

#101

Post by Yoric »

chimen wrote: post #10

Is Rust that important that you have to place "built in Rust" in the title? Is this like a cult following that we only bet on traffic and interest coming from other evangelists where Rust is the only feature that matter? 4 months ago: " Meilisearch, open-source alternative to Algolia in Rust lands a $15M Series A" It's not the first time I see, there are at least 2-3 daily submissions reaching the FP in this manner s…

I believe that there is a good reason.

Rust is currently in the process of trying to eat some of C++'s cake (as well as that of Java, C# or Go). The usual response from C++ (Java, etc.) devotees is that Rust hasn't been tried on large projects so it cannot be compared. Which absolutely makes sense.

Each large scale project that demonstrates that Rust can be used successfully in a domain where C++ (Java, etc.) traditionally rules is a step forward for the Rust community.

Also, as with every language, there is a hype period. We're currently in the Rust honeymoon. My personal honeymoon has stopped a while ago, but Rust remains my favorite language for the foreseeable future.

Re: Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

#102

Post by Yoric »

megous wrote: post #50
pdimitar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question is: do you realize that Rust's `unsafe` is still not as unsafe as C without bound checks, double `free`-s, and others? Point is, it's still an improvement. I am regularly amazed as to why that factually correct and (more and more) time-proven argument is always skipped when criticizing Rust.

Yes, but do you realize you don't have to write C code without bounds checks? You can add your own.

Out of curiosity, do you know projects with C code and bounds checks?

Re: Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

#103

Post by mmachatschek »

This is awesome news! We've been using meilisearch in production for a few months now and we're more than happy with its reliability. Their work of the last few months really paid off, as the search speed and especially the indexing speed has increased a lot thanks to their efforts.

I'm excited to see all the things they'll build in the future.

Re: Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

#104

Post by Yoric »

pdimitar wrote: post #93
megous wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't know any important C codebase that omits necessary bounds checks casually. Often times it would not even make any sense. (If you want to iterate over an array, you don't just iterate until infinity, lol.) String manipulation is often wrapped in functions that handle length/storage size/reallocation/etc in the background.

Nobody is saying they do it casually. People genuinely believe they are without fault, which leads to stuff like Heartbleed (and many others; from 2017 to 2020 there was a number of HN submissions about various well-known pieces of software having buffer under/over-flows). I heard the ideal theory you cite, many many times. Yet many people still do mistakes. How does that fit in your world-view?

For context, an obligatory reference (slash shameless self-promotion) to definitions of safety and safe languages.

https://yoric.github.io/post/safety-and-security/

Re: Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

#105

Post by Yoric »

drcongo wrote: post #17
chimen wrote: post #10

Is Rust that important that you have to place "built in Rust" in the title? Is this like a cult following that we only bet on traffic and interest coming from other evangelists where Rust is the only feature that matter? 4 months ago: " Meilisearch, open-source alternative to Algolia in Rust lands a $15M Series A" It's not the first time I see, there are at least 2-3 daily submissions reaching the FP in this manner s…

I'm not a Rust dev, but I am the target market for this product and I kinda care that it's written in Rust. That gives me some (possibly entirely wrong) confidence that it's likely to be a single binary, easily installed, fast and relatively safe. More broadly, if there had been two headlines on the front page today and the other said "Open source search engine written in Node / JS" I would make assumptions about the…

For context (and I say that as a Rust developer), please note that Rust has the same strength/weakness as Node in terms of dependencies.

There is ongoing work to strengthen this. I do not know the status.

Re: Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

#106

Post by naiv »

manigandham wrote: post #66
naiv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never understand who the target group of Algolia is besides a website where the number of records coincidentally is in the range of the number of queries. At least they got rid of the pricing per indexing transaction which made it even more absurd. If Algolia would offer an instance based pricing on cpu, ram and storage they would be the clear winner imho.

Why do the number of records and searches have to be similar? The current pricing is simple - you pay per "search unit" which scales in both dimensions. The vast majority of small/medium customers would rather pay-as-you-go than maintain a fixed cost instance, and it allows Algolia to efficiently pack them into a multitenant architecture instead of wasting resource overhead.

If you eg index geonames, you have 4 mio. records but you might only have 50.000 queries a month. you pay $4,000 for minimal compute resources, 4GB of RAM and 3 gigabytes of storage space. Would be less but algolia requires you to create a replica for each sort option separately.

With 4 mio. records and 4 mio. queries I would pay the same. But then at least have 4 mio. queries.

The other way around, if we would just index all 200+ countries in the world and have autocomplete with a lot of visitors we would pay for eg 50.000 users per day typing in 3 letters again $4.000.

Same for us, we offer 350.000 movies with 2 mio. scenes. With Typesense or even Elasticsearch Cloud we would pay 5% of what we would pay Algolia.

Re: Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

#107

Post by tpayet »

mmachatschek wrote: post #103

This is awesome news! We've been using meilisearch in production for a few months now and we're more than happy with its reliability. Their work of the last few months really paid off, as the search speed and especially the indexing speed has increased a lot thanks to their efforts. I'm excited to see all the things they'll build in the future.

Thank you Markus <3

Re: Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

#108

Post by drifteaur »

cies wrote: post #67

I think multi-lingual stemming is the point where I see this as a real ES competitor. Still they've come a long way, and burning too much RAM on ES is not the way fwd either.

I've had a great experience with Meilisearch, it was very easy to set up.

But I'm not sure what's behind the claim that "it supports all languages", aside from handling unicode? Does it support stemming at all? Does it have customized stop words per language?

Re: Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

#109

Post by hota_mazi »

chimen wrote: post #10

Is Rust that important that you have to place "built in Rust" in the title? Is this like a cult following that we only bet on traffic and interest coming from other evangelists where Rust is the only feature that matter? 4 months ago: " Meilisearch, open-source alternative to Algolia in Rust lands a $15M Series A" It's not the first time I see, there are at least 2-3 daily submissions reaching the FP in this manner s…

"Built in Rust" carries with it a few positive connotations:

- It's fast. - It's safe. Or more specifically, memory safe, which implies that it will be harder to compromise than similar products written in a different language.

Also, these two points are not hype.

Re: Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust

#110

Post by drcongo »

Yoric wrote: post #105
drcongo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a Rust dev, but I am the target market for this product and I kinda care that it's written in Rust. That gives me some (possibly entirely wrong) confidence that it's likely to be a single binary, easily installed, fast and relatively safe. More broadly, if there had been two headlines on the front page today and the other said "Open source search engine written in Node / JS" I would make assumptions about the…

For context (and I say that as a Rust developer), please note that Rust has the same strength/weakness as Node in terms of dependencies. There is ongoing work to strengthen this. I do not know the status.

Thanks. Would I be correct in assuming that there should be less of a burden on me as an end user with Rust though as I only need to update the one binary that I installed?
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