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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

#31

Post by rozgo »

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 tells me a certain bar has been reached. Tells me the team went through a lot of effort to do their best. And the mature tooling makes it easy for me to evaluate and confirm my assumptions. So yes, positive marketing in my case.

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

#32

Post by curquiza »

bduffany wrote: post #23
leeoniya wrote: post #19

compared to https://typesense.org/ ?

typesense did their own comparison here: https://typesense.org/typesense-vs-algolia-vs-elasticsearch-...

Unfortunately, the comparison with Meilisearch is not up to date in this link.

Also, we have to keep in mind that every comparison written by a company is always oriented.

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

#33

Post by rockwotj »

pdimitar wrote: post #25
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…

It's important, yes. If it was written in C/C++ I'll fully expect to have my servers pwned due to a memory safety bug that these (and many other) languages don't protect against. There's a number of technical people with decision-making powers that pay attention. And a part of them prioritize Rust-written projects. It's a sound (literally) and safe investment. I don't get the people getting ticked off by the "written…

Milli uses unsafe for what it's worth so it's not as safe as you may think.

I do assume any post with "written in rust" does better on hacker news.

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

#34

Post by jabo »

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’ve come to see it this way:

If a set of users are using a product only because it is built in X, that user base is most likely the early adopter audience for X and it dangerously masks whether that product has product-market fit or not.

So if a product markets itself as built in X, it is appealing to early adopters of X.

The long-tail of users on the other hand, care more about what painful problem the product is solving for them.

Now, some of the features of X might provide benefits to end users, but the long tail of users care more about those benefits they get rather than the fact that X provides those benefits, and that the product uses X.

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

#35

Post by serverholic »

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’ve found that there are a confluence of factors that make “built in rust” important to me.

First of all, Rust is relatively new so this tells me that the codebase is likely new.

Secondly, I think rust tends to attract smart people who like programs to be small and fast. Case-in-point meilisearch is a simple, single binary download.

Both of these together indicate that a project has a higher chance of being freshly written code, by smart people, that is small and fast.

Before I get a bunch of we’ll actually’s, I’m not saying these things are true 100% of the time.

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

#36

Post by kristiandupont »

I am using the core (called "Milli") in a local indexer that I run on my repositories and Obsidian files. It works like a charm and I am very happy with it. Obviously that's a use case with very little traffic but just indexing my repositories folder is quite a bit of work and it does it surprisingly fast.

The only real thing I am missing is a typeahead feature.

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

#38

Post by serverholic »

rockwotj wrote: post #33
pdimitar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important, yes. If it was written in C/C++ I'll fully expect to have my servers pwned due to a memory safety bug that these (and many other) languages don't protect against. There's a number of technical people with decision-making powers that pay attention. And a part of them prioritize Rust-written projects. It's a sound (literally) and safe investment. I don't get the people getting ticked off by the "written…

Milli uses unsafe for what it's worth so it's not as safe as you may think. I do assume any post with "written in rust" does better on hacker news.

A little unsafe is better than all unsafe.

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

#39

Post by rockwotj »

curquiza wrote: post #16
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…

Hello! For me, "built in Rust" can be a real marketing argument. Indeed, Rust is a language that has proved its safety in the past. Building a technical product in Rust guarantees stability and safety (no memory issues in general) and performance (no garbage collector issue), so it brings more trust to the users.

FWIW milli does use unsafe in places.

Also I would recommend not conflating no GC and performance. There are lots of reasons for Rust being fast and many have nothing to do with no GC. The main reasons a lot of languages with GC are slower is due to allocating on the heap as opposed to the stack, and in general Rust does a lot of static linking and the compiler has the full amount of information to optimize calls without needing to move stuff to the heap. That's the main perf win.

Actually there are times when GC is more efficient than than automatically freeing memory because GC can batch cleanup work.

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

#40

Post by spoiler »

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…

As some people mentioned: I generally expect a higher standard of software when I see "build in Rust".

That expectation includes a few things such as stability and operational UX (ie how easy it is to run and maintain).

And these (in my experience as a Rust developer) stems from the fact that it's much easier to get the MVP and business logic taken care of becau I'm not bogged down by the drudgery of menial tasks that C++ imposes.

There's also a much lower "devtime" cost to adding UX in Rust than C++

Of course, this all holds equally true when comparing Rust to a higher level language like TypeScript and its rich ecosystem, but it does come at higher resources utilisation for the same task too (on average, maybe not always, especially after the code gets JITed).

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