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Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

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21–30 of 338 posts

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but from my perspective (you probably had better insight into these companies involvement than me) there was always a question about how committed companies this large really are when they only have a few projects in the language. Hiring core developers puts all doubts to bed (and also the kind of investment that actually for counts for something).

As someone who has lived through hype cycles, big companies can pull the rug just as quickly on these investments as they’ve made them. While this does indicate a more serious interest, it’s not nearly the safety net you think. To the contrary, a bunch of FAANG driven contributions tend to make projects focused too much on particular use cases. Go’s clusterfuck of package management is entirely because Google doesn’t…

> a bunch of FAANG driven contributions tend to make projects focused too much on particular use cases

This is one of the challenges we have, as a project, in this next phase of its life: make sure that we are helping organizations achieve their goals, while not allowing it to be totally directed by them. Rust governance is set up to be resilient to takeovers by any one organization, but we're now playing with some of the most powerful organizations on the planet. We're glad to have them, but we do have to make sure that we make Rust what we want it to be, and not purely what various large tech companies want it to be. It's a delicate balance.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#25

I believe that's Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook all looking to get involved in core Rust development (I think partially triggered by the Mozilla layoffs). If anybody was still harbouring doubts about Rust's future, now is the time to lay them aside.

Even Apple is interested [1]

[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-Fr...

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#26

Is Mozilla going to continue sponsoring the Rust project for the forseeable future? After letting servo out [1] > Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed. Now it’s time for Servo to leave the nest! Is there any chance they do the same with the Rust language? Either way,…

We are still in the process of setting up the Rust Foundation, and so you'll see who's sponsoring at that point.

Hopefully it will be more open with showing where the sponsorship money goes (I hope most of it will go to developers and Rust contributors like you) than other foundations that I don't want to name here.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#27

I believe that's Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook all looking to get involved in core Rust development (I think partially triggered by the Mozilla layoffs). If anybody was still harbouring doubts about Rust's future, now is the time to lay them aside.

Friends of mine that are contract programmers have been ramping on Rust for the past 2-3 years claiming the number of requests for it has been increasing exponentially. I installed it two weeks ago and have been getting a feel for it. It's like if C++, C#, and npm had an offspring. I always hoped Java would make a comeback, but Rust is looking like the real deal.

Applications of Java and Rust do not overlap. As a big data engineer, Rust does not provide any advantage to me. Good luck rewritting all the big data tools from Java (Elasticsearch, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Neo4j, Deeplearning4j, Cassandra, Solr, Arrow, OrientDB) and all the scientific stuff from C++ (Eigen, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Jax, Halide, OpenCV and the multitude of resources for CUDA and OpenCL) and databases (MySQL, MongoDB). If I want to contribute to LLVM or JVM, they are C++, the browsers are all C++. Unreal Engine and Unity (IL2CPP and engine) are all C++. Are you doing microVMs or drivers? Then probably Rust is a good investment (discutable), otherwise, I would wait for better alternatives. I will stick to Java, Scala, Python and C++ for the foreseeable future.

EDIT: may the downvotes come from the idealists that hammer down pragmatists, like our opinion doesn't even count

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1248321281474408450

Microsoft has Project Verona

Microsoft has C#, F# and Visual Basic that are rather more significant than Project Verona.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#30
post #7

Great to see Rust won't be starved for support. Now someone needs to take over MDN . By far the best JavaScript documentation

Why does someone need to take over MDN?

Firefox laid off the MDN team a couple months ago. https://mobile.twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333...
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