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We moved from Pony to Rust

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Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#21

Post by Zababa »

wyager wrote: post #18
Zababa wrote: post #16

This feels like the same pattern as Dark leaving OCaml for F#: https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml// . Ecosystem matters a lot these days. Outside of these two specific cases, I wonder if we're, as an industry, too afraid of writing this kind of stuff now I feel like it was done a lot before, and not at all these days. Sure, NIH syndrome is a fallacy, but having to write one library may not be so bad. I would be…

I used to work at an OCaml company and it wasn't nearly as much of an issue as one might predict. You can (it turns out) build a very successful business even if there aren't a lot of existing libraries, or if the language lacks certain basic features like native multithreading (same with Python of course). I don't have a great model for why this isn't devastatingly expensive, but it's probably some combination of *…

That's interesting, thanks for sharing your experience. Sometimes I wonder how much interesting experience I miss by mostly using things people already built. Sure, if you're just trying to get something done it's probably faster, but on the other hand spending more time gives you experience.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#22

Post by pbiggar »

Zababa wrote: post #16

This feels like the same pattern as Dark leaving OCaml for F#: https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml// . Ecosystem matters a lot these days. Outside of these two specific cases, I wonder if we're, as an industry, too afraid of writing this kind of stuff now I feel like it was done a lot before, and not at all these days. Sure, NIH syndrome is a fallacy, but having to write one library may not be so bad. I would be…

That was my thought (I wrote the Dark post).

It also makes me think of CircleCI where they stayed in Clojure for quite some time - it really didn't have that much need for libraries (and the ones it did need, such as AWS, were provided by Java).

When evaluating whether to use a non-mainstream language, the rule I use now is:

- will I need to interact significantly with the outside world in a way that can only be done with libraries?

- if not, do I gain a lot with this non-mainstream language?

That contrasts against how I used to do it, where I viewed it as a trade-off between the ecosystem and the advantage of the non-mainstream language.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#23

Post by pjmlp »

Zababa wrote: post #16

This feels like the same pattern as Dark leaving OCaml for F#: https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml// . Ecosystem matters a lot these days. Outside of these two specific cases, I wonder if we're, as an industry, too afraid of writing this kind of stuff now I feel like it was done a lot before, and not at all these days. Sure, NIH syndrome is a fallacy, but having to write one library may not be so bad. I would be…

That is why when comparing languages we should always look beyond grammar and semantics.

This is nothing new, it is also a reason why languages like C and C++ won the systems programming wars from the 1990's.

After a while one gets tired to write wrapper libraries, or having to pay extra for an additional compiler that isn't part of the platform SDKs.

Hence why successful languages always need some kind of killer feature, or a company with deep enough pockets willing to push it into the mainstream no matter what.

Same applies to new OS architecture ideas as well.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#24

Post by pbiggar »

wyager wrote: post #18
Zababa wrote: post #16

This feels like the same pattern as Dark leaving OCaml for F#: https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml// . Ecosystem matters a lot these days. Outside of these two specific cases, I wonder if we're, as an industry, too afraid of writing this kind of stuff now I feel like it was done a lot before, and not at all these days. Sure, NIH syndrome is a fallacy, but having to write one library may not be so bad. I would be…

I used to work at an OCaml company and it wasn't nearly as much of an issue as one might predict. You can (it turns out) build a very successful business even if there aren't a lot of existing libraries, or if the language lacks certain basic features like native multithreading (same with Python of course). I don't have a great model for why this isn't devastatingly expensive, but it's probably some combination of *…

I don't agree with this at all.

While it's true that there are lots of bad libraries and many libraries are easy, you really isolate yourself from the broader ecosystem by doing this. Vendors and 3rd party solutions are now much harder to use, and when you use them you'll probably only use them at a surface level instead of using all the features.

And some things are so mature and vast you don't have a chance of building them yourself. If what you are doing can be done well in very mature ecosystems like React or PyTorch, the effort to recreate them will dwarf the time spend on important work.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#25

Post by OJFord »

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.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#26

Post by steveklabnik »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #11
steveklabnik wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every widely used technology, someone had to be the first. And then some small group had to be the early adopters.

If you are a startup it’s best to focus on the product and not necessarily the implementation Groupon was prototyped in Wordpress.

For some startups, that makes sense, yes. For other startups, it may not. See pg's classic essay (that I'm not 100% sure I agree with, but, we're on hacker news) for one example of why you may want to use a more niche langauge: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Ruby on Rails was created for Basecamp.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#27

Post by mcintyre1994 »

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.

It sounds like no other technology (including Rust 1.0) met their performance and concurrency requirements at the time though.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#28

Post by Zababa »

wk_end wrote: post #15
Zababa wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml is old and reliable, and I think it was already proven to work in the industry when Jane Street chose it. Even if it wasn't the best programming language ever, it was still a strong choice at the time, and still is. Pony on the other hand was and still is very young. I'm not saying it's a bad choice, but it's definitely not the same risk profile as OCaml. It's just OCaml by the way, for Objective Caml. Unless y…

> I think it was already proven to work in the industry when Jane Street chose it. Not really. Outside of Jane Street OCaml has scarcely been proven to work in the industry now . As a big OCaml fan and former OCaml professional, I say this lovingly: it was (and remains) popular in academia and that's mostly it. And Pony is roughly as old now as OCaml was when Jane Street started using it. The actual reason OCaml's ri…

> Outside of Jane Street OCaml has scarcely been proven to work in the industry now.

I think it depends on what you're working on. If you're building anything that looks like a interpreter/compiler, it's probably one of your best bets. If you're working on stuff that needs a lot of libraries, and relatively obscure ones, it's probably one of your worst bet. If you need good interaction with Windows, it's probably not a great choice either. The businesses I know, which are mostly SaaS, would probably fall under "not the best choice, use with caution". If that's the general case, I agree with you.

> The actual reason OCaml's risk profile was much lower was because it effectively has the backing of the French government and academy, which is quite the boon.

I wonder how much Jane Street benefited from that. The classes préparatoires are still using OCaml to this day (or at least were 3 years ago), and that's usually the best students of France. I've also heard that Facebook recruited quite a lot, for Hack and Flow.

> And remember that it was the year 2000 - Perl was basically the only language with the sort of library ecosystem (CPAN) that is expected of languages now: poor community support was much less of a liability then.

That's a good point. I think OCaml still has a better package manager and build tool than some really popular languages (I'm thinking specifically about Python), but it's hard to beat the ecosystem.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#29

Post by ZeroCool2u »

The product Wallaroo is building sounds really interesting, (It's so appealing I honestly checked out their open positions), but it's really difficult to get a feel for what exactly it's like to use their product now.

The description and outcome statistics make it sound _excellent_ and their technology stack makes their claims seem viable. However, and I say this as someone that is currently running an MLOps RFP, after looking at every page of their site and all their open job postings I have no idea what it's actually like to use their product.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#30

Post by jokethrowaway »

pbiggar wrote: post #24
wyager wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at an OCaml company and it wasn't nearly as much of an issue as one might predict. You can (it turns out) build a very successful business even if there aren't a lot of existing libraries, or if the language lacks certain basic features like native multithreading (same with Python of course). I don't have a great model for why this isn't devastatingly expensive, but it's probably some combination of *…

I don't agree with this at all. While it's true that there are lots of bad libraries and many libraries are easy, you really isolate yourself from the broader ecosystem by doing this. Vendors and 3rd party solutions are now much harder to use, and when you use them you'll probably only use them at a surface level instead of using all the features. And some things are so mature and vast you don't have a chance of buil…

I know plenty of companies not using third parties for security or ideological reasons.

Code is code: both models (3rd party vs no 3rd party) can work and the time spent reinventing the wheel is not necessarily business breaking.

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