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

#311

Post by jdlshore » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

jjnoakes wrote: post #276

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…

I love Rust but I am still looking for the perfect blend of the two camps. One the one hand, Go/Node/Python/etc doesn't scratch my itch for the strong type system (sum types/tagged enums mostly) and on the other hand even though I like prototyping in Rust I really miss things like a REPL, more terse syntax, and a bit more expressiveness. I think OCaml is closer to my ideal but the ecosystem isn't quite there. Maybe a…

Have you looked at Node + TypeScript? I'm just starting to dig into TS, but its type system is one of the better ones I've seen. And Node is nice and mature with good async capabilities.

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

#312

Post by pdimitar » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #228

pdimitar wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the fault of Rust compiler per se but in my case the errors that mismatching trait impls from async libraries yield can be downright suicide-inducing. I recognize this is not entirely on rustc though.

esteban of course gave you an excellent response already, but just another bit of like, context here: while it may not be on rustc, the developers want to go beyond the norm here. rustc understands if you write async/await syntax like JavaScript, and then directly proposes that you switch to the Rust syntax: pub async fn foo() -> i32 { unimplemented(); } pub async fn bar() { let f = await foo(); } gives error: incorr…

Check sibling reply. Sadly I never wrote those down. :(

I'll definitely do so going forward.

The problem is with that is the impostor syndrome: I legitimately can't tell if I am an idiot and skipped some basic Rust training, or the error messages are truly confusing and unproductive.

But your messages help. I'll just write those down and send them to GitHub's issue list.

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

#313

Post by efficax » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

Ylmaz wrote: post #143

I like this quote from 'The art of Unix Programming' published in 2003 "While it still makes sense to write system programs and time-critical kernels of applications in C or C++, the world has changed a great deal since these languages came to prominence in the 1980s. In 2003, processors are a thousand times faster, memories are a thousand times larger, and disks are a factor of ten thousand larger, for roughly const…

in 2003 you hoofed your servers to a colocation center and plugged them into the internet yourself. Deploying was something you did over `scp`. Buy a big server and you're good to go. That can still be the case these days (see stackoverflow which at least until recently was not using cloud deployment). But for the most part people use cloud platforms that charge by fractions of a second of cpu time. It's never been more cost effective to use a compiled language than it is today. And that would also apply to bare metal bring-your-own-server deployments. Want to host a monster site on just a pair of beefy servers? The less resource intensive your backend, the more requests you can serve per second.

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

#314

Post by lumb63 » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #237

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…

> 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. I've been saying that for a while. If you're building web backends, Rust is not a good choice. Go is so much easier. The green thread system gets rid of the thread/async distinction, garbage collection means you don't have to obsess o…

They are out of the mainstream, but only because "systems people who have exchanged any hope of losing their virginity for the exciting opportunity to think about hex numbers and their relationships with the operating system, the hardware, and ancient blood rituals that Bjarne Stroustrup performed at Stonehenge" "SOLVE THE BEAR MENACE" [0].

[0]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

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

#315

Post by julianeon » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

I find it mystifying that one of the reasons you can supposedly pass over Rust, and avoid performance concerns, is to "take the free money." Literally.

That is, the free money, in credits, that allows you to not worry about performance for a while.

The obvious problem being... "What happens when the free money runs out?"

It's not addressed, but the implied answer seems to be "Well, by then it'll be six months later, and..."

And? And what? It's still a problem! It didn't go away.

The money deflected the perf concerns for some time, maybe a year - but then it's back, bigger and badder than ever.

Rust solves that by not requiring that outlay ever, by being more efficient.

Seems like a very poor reason to not choose Rust, to me.

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

#316

Post by tcfhgj » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

ReflectedImage wrote: post #298

dcow wrote: post #182

I don't agree. I think the author is conflating two things: 1. learning Rust, and 2. using Rust. If you take away "Rust made us slow because our team had to learn how to use it and thus we had slow iterations and it's harder to find hires with Rust knowledge" from the equation, then you aren't left with much argument against using Rust early. The iteration time issue with Rust is solved by experience. We use Rust and…

Well Python code will on average will be more correct than Rust code. I'm not sure why you feel Rust code would be more correct than Python code but it certainly isn't true.

I strongly believe that if I would code anything significant my Rust could would be more correct.

The reasons are types and rusts multi threading guarantees, which become even more helpful when doing refactorings

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

#317

Post by autophagian » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

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…

I feel like this is probably on the money, at least when it comes to building a startup. I often use Rust where before I would use Go/NodeJS/Python, but mostly because I like the type system and velocity on side-projects isn't as important.

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

#318

Post by usgroup » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 9:16 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #237

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…

> 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. I've been saying that for a while. If you're building web backends, Rust is not a good choice. Go is so much easier. The green thread system gets rid of the thread/async distinction, garbage collection means you don't have to obsess o…

You're right. I think that it replaces C/C++ for many use cases. I'm a quant, and I use it to write fast algos for research. It won't be long until Rust has good high level SIMD primitives like the faster crate offered. I can't see myself using anything else thereafter for performant code.

You may be underestimating the amount of need there is for performant code though. Its everywhere.

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

#319

Post by tekkk » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 9:17 PM UTC

jjnoakes wrote: post #276

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…

I love Rust but I am still looking for the perfect blend of the two camps. One the one hand, Go/Node/Python/etc doesn't scratch my itch for the strong type system (sum types/tagged enums mostly) and on the other hand even though I like prototyping in Rust I really miss things like a REPL, more terse syntax, and a bit more expressiveness. I think OCaml is closer to my ideal but the ecosystem isn't quite there. Maybe a…

Pick a problem, not a tool first. Unless you're more interested in the tool than the problem, then it's fine. I don't love Rust, but I can get by. TS+NodeJS is okay. But I'm more interested in the problems that I'm solving so I just use whatever is the most suited.

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

#320

Post by Ylmaz » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 9:17 PM UTC

dilippkumar wrote: post #282

Ylmaz wrote: post #143

I like this quote from 'The art of Unix Programming' published in 2003 "While it still makes sense to write system programs and time-critical kernels of applications in C or C++, the world has changed a great deal since these languages came to prominence in the 1980s. In 2003, processors are a thousand times faster, memories are a thousand times larger, and disks are a factor of ten thousand larger, for roughly const…

In a benchmark of how many fortune responses are returned by various web frameworks[0], nodejs returned 80k odd fortunes per second. The fastest c++ framework compared here returned 616k odd fortunes per second. Assuming that my application scales by the same amount (big assumption, yes), I could cut AWS costs by 7.7 times (!!!) by using the C++ implementation. I'm pretty sure that maintaining a C++ codebase is less…

The speed of your web framework is, in reality, often irrelevant. Our slow nodejs app handles millions of customers with a few cheap and simple caching layers. Our salaries are a lot higher than the infrastructure costs.