I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again • Hacker News Board

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#191

Post by bxparks » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:50 PM UTC

brimstedt wrote: post #172

ozten wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NodeJS kind of muddies the waters. It ate a lot of use cases that would have previously been done in Java. That created conflict between backend teams that wanted statically typed code and a "boring" tech choice against "full stack" developers creating a backend service. I think Rust will see a lot of adoption in web services that are glorified CRUD APIs. It would have been a poor choice to do many of these workloads…

I've really tried to give js/ts in backend a go. Both by nodejs and deno. And by kickstarting my own projects as well as diving into experienced nodejs developers' code. I really don't see how anyone choses nodejs/deno to anything. Java imo gives you much less trouble, is more stable, has a working (!!!) Unit testing setup and exceptional runtime. Next on my list is to give rust a go, since I'm intrigued by its featu…

Your post is a great example why I wish Go lang was named something different. Because you use the lower cased versions java, rust, js, ts, nodejs, deno, etc. But all your 'go' refer to the verb, not the Go language.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#192

Post by orthecreedence » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:50 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #38

Question for HN, all things being equal (you are not more familiar with one language/framework) what language would you choose to build a startup in?

The language you're most proficient in that has a somewhat decent community.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#193

Post by hinkley » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #149

hinkley wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second mistake was only flirting with Bertrand Meyer’s work until the Gang of Four showed up and wrecked Java forever. Meyer + functional core nets you a great deal of code with no exception declarations and an easy path for unit tests. If it hurts to do stuff it might not be the language that sucks, it might be you. Pain is information. Adapt.

Don’t know Meyer’s work - any suggestions for good starting points?

There’s the Design By Contract work of course, but I’m still trying to cite what I thought was his best advice which is to separate decisions from execution, which is compatible with but I find to be subtler than the functional core pattern.

Often we mix glue code and IO code with our business logic, and that makes for tough testing situations. Especially in languages that allow parallel tests. If you fetch data in one function and act upon it in another, you have an easy imperative code structure that provides most of the benefits of Dependency Injection. Your stack traces are also half as deep, and aren’t crowded with objects calling themselves four times in a row before delegating.

    if (this.shouldDoTheThing()) {
       this.doTheThing();
    }

Importantly with this, structure, growth in complexity of the yes/no decision doesn’t increase the complexity of the action code tests, and growth in glue code (auth headers, talking to multiple backends, etc) doesn’t increase the complexity of the logic tests.

A big part of scaling an application is finding ways to make complexity additive or logarithmic, rather than multiplicative. But people miss this because they start off with four tests checking it the wrong way, and it takes four tests to do it the right way. But then later it’s 6 vs 8, and then 8 vs 16, and then it’s straight to the moon after that.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#194

Post by veqq » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:55 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #164

adamnemecek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not the same. Errors force you to explicitly handle unexpected conditions. Exceptions don't. And "?" is for making error handling not take up half of loc. Read up on how exceptions work in C++ implementation-wise. It's not pretty.

That's the problem, though, right? 99.999% of the time you absolutely should not be "handling" an error: you should merely propagate it so it gets closer to code that has actual intent. Languages that force you to try to "handle" errors--which includes Java, due to their botched concept of checked exceptions--both encourage the wrong behavior in the developer and cause the code to be littered with boilerplate to impl…

> you absolutely should not be "handling" an error: you should merely propagate it so it gets closer to code that has actual intent

Why?!

There are 2 types of errors:

- an error in your program logic, which you need to fix

- an error from something out of your control (network down, disc errors, faulty input... Which you certainly must handle

What's the alternative? Let errors trigger undefined behavior and corrupt your DB? Not pretty.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#195

Post by steveklabnik » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

a5huynh wrote: post #144

estebank wrote: post #142

I find it surprising that so many people are arguing about the benefits and drawbacks of `?`, when in my experience the handling of Result and Option haven't been an issue in practice on the consuming side (`?`, `.unwrap()`, `.map()`, `.ok()`, if let, match, let chains, let else, etc. help a lot), but where all the pain comes from is having to declare the appropriate error type itself. Libraries like `anyhow` takes s…

I've run into similar issues and found that the `thiserror` crate ( https://crates.io/crates/thiserror ) combined w/ anyhow makes a lot of that pain go away

For those reading this that aren't super familiar, common Rust advice is "use thiserror for libraries and anyhow for applications," as they make slightly different tradeoffs and so are useful, especially together.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#196

Post by lenkite » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

galangalalgol wrote: post #176

adastra22 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golang absolutely has a faster development cycle than Rust. Unless you’re a Rust expert who never touches Go, but then it’s an issue of familiarity. Go devs hit the ground running and the ergonomics are streamlined, and the borrow checker and other rust restrictions don’t get in the way.

Given my downvotes you seem to be with the consensus on this one. I had 30 years of c++ development going into rust and I never found myself fighting the borrow checker. Golang seemed the same, just started coding and stuff worked mostly. But, the complexity of rust was familar coming from c++ with generics and macros but without some of the footguns, so it just seemed like power, not clutter. I like go, but I wouldn…

30 years of C++ development experience means you aren't going to find any PL difficult and therefore your views on easy/difficult a PL is to learn and get going cannot be taken seriously. :)

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#197

Post by newZWhoDis » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #14

nemothekid wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer having extra work done writing code (adding "?") than having to do extra work reading code. Exceptions are functionally invisible control flow; it isn't clear to the reader that a function may blow up if the exceptions are unhandled.

In Java functions declares Exceptions in its type signature, so it does all of that automatically. Then you get a compile error if you don't handle it in the function, or you need to declare the function throws it, so it is type safe. Note that people now consider that as a mistake, people prefer having Exceptions be hidden instead of explicit and requiring handling like that.

> Note that people now consider that as a mistake, people prefer having Exceptions be hidden instead of explicit and requiring handling like that.

What people? Please tell me where they’re at so I can tell them they are wrong (lol)

But seriously, I could not disagree more.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#198

Post by marcosdumay » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

richardwhiuk wrote: post #72

zeroxfe wrote: post #37

If you're thinking about building something in Rust, a good question to ask is, "what would I use if Rust didn't exist?" If your answer is something like Go or Node.js, then Rust is probably not the right choice. If your answer is C or C++ or something similar, then Rust is very likely the right choice. Obv, there are always exceptions here, but this helps you work through things a bit more objectively. Rust can be a…

Not sure I agree with Go vs Rust. I think if you would choose Java or Python or C#, then Rust might not be the right choice.

Whatever the absolute merits (or lack of them) of Go, the fact is that if it's a good (enough) option for you, then it's almost certain that some language will fit your problem better than Rust.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#199

Post by alfor » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

Performance of language is almost never a big concern, but it’s so interesting for a technical person.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#200

Post by ye-olde-sysrq » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:57 PM UTC

brimstedt wrote: post #172

ozten wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NodeJS kind of muddies the waters. It ate a lot of use cases that would have previously been done in Java. That created conflict between backend teams that wanted statically typed code and a "boring" tech choice against "full stack" developers creating a backend service. I think Rust will see a lot of adoption in web services that are glorified CRUD APIs. It would have been a poor choice to do many of these workloads…

I've really tried to give js/ts in backend a go. Both by nodejs and deno. And by kickstarting my own projects as well as diving into experienced nodejs developers' code. I really don't see how anyone choses nodejs/deno to anything. Java imo gives you much less trouble, is more stable, has a working (!!!) Unit testing setup and exceptional runtime. Next on my list is to give rust a go, since I'm intrigued by its featu…

"I really don't see how anyone choses nodejs/deno to anything."

This is going to sound mean but I don't really know how to phrase it more nicely. People building backends in js/ts are doing so because either they, or a critical mass of the people they expect to code in it, don't know any better backend languages.

I don't mean for this to be judge-y. People have different skillsets. A nodejs backend can be the right choice if you're a full-stack dev or a solo dev and you mainly know js and you get a lot of agility and correctness by using what you know instead of trying to use a "better" choice but one that you yourself are less likely to use correctly or quickly in your own use case.

It can also be the right choice if you're a big backend java/etc guru but you know you want to set this thing up but then just monitor/oversee frontend/fullstack devs being the ones who do incremental modifications to it.

But yeah - without additional outside constraints and everything else being equal, it doesn't make a lot of sense to use nodejs as opposed to basically anything more boring - be it java, rails, etc.

The thing that surprises me the most about node based backends is that they forego both the platform maturity and static-safety of java AND the ridiculous amount of batteries included into django and rails, just to be able to use javascript, of all things. What you could rails-g in a minute you could instead spend a day looking for an npm package that won't be abandoned in a month or spend eternity rolling your own everything and then maintaining it.