Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We moved from Pony to Rust

wallaroo.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 178 posts

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#141

Post by spooneybarger »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #137

Pony is a younger than Rust and has far smaller exposure. It isn't strange that it didn't worked out. Using the shiny new thing is rarely a good choice.

Technical issues were never the problem with the first product we built at Wallaroo. Pony met all of our technical needs for that product. We never got product market fit with it.

Rightly, around the time I left the company, they pivoted and started a new product that they thought would have better product market fit and they started over with a new codebase as it is a rather different product than what we first built.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#142

Post by [deleted] »

kaba0 wrote: post #119
pkulak wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kotlin is strictly worse if you value language features above all else. In that, there are several (several!) features it doesn't have.

I’m not one who values languages based on number of features alone (otherwise C++ or C# would be my all go), but based on the synergy of them. I think in this case, Scala is a really elegant language with many features that all come from some simple to understand primitives, for example everything is an object, that creates a highly coherent language. This is in contrast with Kotlin, that tries to gain popularity by…

[deleted]

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#143

Post by Zababa »

int_19h wrote: post #131
dleslie wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SH2, which lacks llvm support but has C compilers available.

Oh, you mean target architectures. But stuff like SuperH is used only for embedded these days, where even C is often rather idiosyncratic. For most coders, Zig is comparable to other mainstream languages in terms of supporting mainstream platforms. Anyway, this is really a matter of implementation, not a language issue. There's nothing about Zig that makes it inherently impossible to support SH2 or any other platform…

> Anyway, this is really a matter of implementation, not a language issue.

I think separating the two is a bit artificial. Python being slow is partially an implementation issue but the fast implementations can't run everything. When you compare languages, you have to compare implementations, otherwise it's meaningless.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#144

Post by dleslie »

jedisct1 wrote: post #136
dleslie wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zig did not compile to C, yet, and so is restricted to llvm's targets.

Zig's stage2 compiler has a C backend https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/master/src/codegen/c.zig

That's not released or finished, last I checked a few weeks ago.

Edit: Oh, looks like it was released just a few days after I last checked; ha. Although, it's not clear to me whether it's intended for end-user use yet.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/releases/tag/0.8.0

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#145

Post by forgotpwd16 »

OJFord wrote: post #25
Thaxll wrote: post #3

Shocking that using a language that no one use was a mistake on the long term. It made 0 sense what so ever to use it in the first place.

I think that might be more obvious today than it was five years ago? In 2016 rust was already ahead of pony in adoption, sure, but they were both young interesting languages. The five years since have widened the gap considerably in maturity (of the core language as well as community/ecosystem) I think.

Rust had Mozilla behind it, a well-known relatively large tech organization/corporation. Most, if not all, popular languages nowadays tend to have/had some backing behind them.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#146

Post by forgotpwd16 »

spooneybarger wrote: post #141
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #137

Pony is a younger than Rust and has far smaller exposure. It isn't strange that it didn't worked out. Using the shiny new thing is rarely a good choice.

Technical issues were never the problem with the first product we built at Wallaroo. Pony met all of our technical needs for that product. We never got product market fit with it. Rightly, around the time I left the company, they pivoted and started a new product that they thought would have better product market fit and they started over with a new codebase as it is a rather different product than what we first buil…

Arguably the non-technical issues are equally important and, according to the essay, those were the reasons they ended up choosing Rust going forwards.

>Pony [...] has a smaller community, and as a small startup we were better off not having to solve problems outside our core domain

>wealth of available libraries

>access to a large community that will guarantee ongoing future support

>a wide variety of tools

>much larger pool of engineers who are eager to learn and work in Rust, or who already have significant Rust experience

>more resources available for learning Rust, and more opportunities for participation in conferences, etc.

Didn't say that Pony was bad for some technical reason. It was/is bad choice for a startup to use due to being a relatively new, niche language.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#147

Post by FpUser »

southerntofu wrote: post #138
FpUser wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing I look when working with any language excluding shell scripts is interactive debugging from IDE.

My two cents as a non-professional programmer: i've found hacking on someone else's codebase to be very hard with/without a debugger in dynamic languages like JS/Python where most things are untyped and you get runtime exceptions upon eg. trying to call a method on a nil object. BUT back on the thread's topic, since i started programming in Rust, the only time i've felt it was hard to wrap my head around the compiler…

While I use scripting languages when needed my main languages were always compiled with static typing. And I did not need debugger for hacking code. I need debugger mostly for tracing my own code when I have some bugs mostly related to algorithmic errors, not with the program blowing up on me.

I did not program in Rust so I can not really judge the language but I doubt that it is so nice and expressive comparatively to modern C++ that suddenly the types of bugs I am hunting will magically disappear.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#148

Post by travisgriggs »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #71
travisgriggs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How depressing. Probably true. But depressing nevertheless. Bigger frameworks, more complicated libraries, deeper multi tiered tooling, all of these things that we call ecosystem, reduce access to general purpose programming and creativity. We've created a bureaucracy of execution so complicated that we need vast amounts of funding to keep us at the tiller doing the biddings of e-commerce apps. It's like the founding…

This is how it is in every applied field. It's not as if 2x4s fall from trees and we use them in our construction. The 2x4 is a specific manufacturing output that's used as inputs for lots and lots of other things. It's the same way when it comes to software. Just like when doing cabinetry nothing is stopping you from processing wood yourself, likewise nothing is stopping you from rolling your own frameworks. But the…

Where this fails for me is that the 2x4 is a standard. And it's simple. And it's universally acceptable. I can send my wife and my kids alike to buy one from who knows where with little to zero instruction. They can work with it with ease. The "ecosystem" fades into the background. But modern software ecosystems are the exact opposite. You spend more time trying to learn/master/navigate the ecosystem than you do working with the metaphorical 2x4. To make matters worse, getting a 2x4 has been temporally stable for a long time. Not much has changed since my grandfather could send me to the store to buy a 2x4 on my own. But software ecosystems evolve and migrate weekly. Your argument demonstrates that all developed fields create ecosystems. But it does not address the issue that not all ecosystems are equal. Some are good. Some are bad. It's my opinion that modern software ecosystems look more like the British Civil Service than the ecosystem that produces 2x4s.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#149

Post by pkulak »

nuerow wrote: post #139
pkulak wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kotlin is strictly worse if you value language features above all else. In that, there are several (several!) features it doesn't have.

> Kotlin is strictly worse if you value language features above all else. In that, there are several (several!) features it doesn't have. Could you please elaborate on that? It was my understanding that Kotlin did everything that Java did (or any JVM-based language) but actually added first-class support for basic features missing from Java that required magic sauce like Lombok to fill in the gaps.

Oh, I was comparing Scala to Kotlin. I agree with your statement completely.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#150

Post by dleslie »

dleslie wrote: post #144
jedisct1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zig's stage2 compiler has a C backend https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/master/src/codegen/c.zig

That's not released or finished, last I checked a few weeks ago. Edit: Oh, looks like it was released just a few days after I last checked; ha. Although, it's not clear to me whether it's intended for end-user use yet. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/releases/tag/0.8.0

Self-Reply addendum: on Discord the devs claim it's nowhere near ready for general use.
Post reply on HN