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

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

#371

Post by 12345hn6789 »

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…

If you don't need bare metal something like Scala or koitlin will fit. Scala is extremely expressful and does CRUD very well

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

#372

Post by steveklabnik »

faitswulff wrote: post #370
steveklabnik wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We ended up building one https://crates.io/crates/dropshot Happy to talk about anything!

Oh this supports OpenAPI! That's exciting. I'll definitely check this out when I have a chance. Thanks!

Yes, that was a primary motivation! We end up consuming it via typescript, and so you get typing info the whole way up and down the stack, which is very nice :) You’re welcome!

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

#373

Post by Frog0fWar »

nawgz wrote: post #301
mcronce wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends exactly how simple that CRUD API is. If there's any business logic, I'd rather get all the cheap correctness guarantees that Rust provides. I don't find myself making many truly dumb CRUD APIs. Time to iterate is also only much faster in certain situations, e.g. local development; if you have to e.g. build a container image, push to a registry, and redeploy to a k8s cluster somewhere, those savings become…

> Time to iterate is also only much faster in certain situations, e.g. local development; if you have to e.g. build a container image, push to a registry, and redeploy to a k8s cluster somewhere, those savings become somewhere between less significant and nonexistent. Can you expand on what you mean here? I know you're not implying Rust is faster to move thru a CICD pipeline, so can you tell me what you do mean? I se…

I think the point being made here is that all CI/CD/SDLC stuff is effectively slowing down development, so the difference in iteration speed between Python and Rust is less explicit. But I dare to disagree, I just can't connect the dots here, moving code further down the CICD pipeline doesn't mean we can't work on the code itself or think about project improvement ideas.

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

#374

Post by FridgeSeal »

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…

I’ve been writing data ETL pipelines in Rust and having a fantastic time.

Most of my data, cost and performance requirements aren’t suited to the likes of FiveTran/etc, and whilst I could theoretically use Python, it’s far too slow, and the propensity to crash unexpectedly (meaning I have to spend extra time debugging) means the development velocity is actually worse than just writing it in Rust. Plus, most of the libs and tooling I’d use from Python are available in Rust.

I’ve also written Rest and GRPC API’s in Rust (mostly for serving up data and being a query layer), and found it a far more pleasant experience than Python/Typescript/C#. Admittedly a somewhat ”smaller” use-case than a lot of what people would consider web-API’s but still.

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

#375

Post by ReflectedImage »

timerol wrote: post #289
dilippkumar wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm pretty sure that maintaining a C++ codebase is less than 7.7 times more expensive than Node, even if you throw in extra development time etc. The problem here is assuming that a 7.7x less expensive AWS bill is the same value as a 7.7x more expensive development time. Imagine an app that is maintained by one programmer costing $10k a month and running in AWS for $1k a month. It is not worth dividing that AWS cos…

"AWS for $1k a month" hahaha. People spend $90k on AWS by accident.

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

#376

Post by hot_gril »

Frog0fWar wrote: post #368
Animats wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google developed Go specifically so they didn't have to use C++ in high-volume web backends, which is what they did previously.

Another (maybe even more) important motivation was to have simple, statically-typed language so that new hires can contribute to the codebase faster and the code itself is more standardized and easier to maintain at large scale.

They basically got there with Java + some frameworks. It's not the best (I'd like NodeJS), but it works and has a huge ecosystem already, and anyone can use it. Some people complain that Golang is designed specifically for its original use case of specialized web backends and isn't great otherwise, or that its main design goal was being "not C++."

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

#377

Post by nazka »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #200
brimstedt wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I love Rails and if it was continuing to grow even so slightly it will be my go to for sure. But unfortunately it has been slowly declining for a long time… Many moving to Go, Elixir, Rust, and elsewhere. It was by far the best dev experience with a framework I ever had. The last version still looks great. But realistically unless if you plan to do a rewrite, which is never a good idea, it may not be the best option out there. Even more with having to get people onboard for the next years ahead and the ecosystem too. I am looking for a framework to use and see grow a lot for at least the next 4 years with having hiring in mind.

Spring boot is great but it does have its quirks. Config and plumbing for instance compare to Nest or Rails doesn’t makes it the best and fastest dev experience. And all the Java extra stuff and it’s ecosystem makes it solid but also old compare to what you can see happening in other languages.

I have Quarkus in my mind though. It looks amazing in dev experience with lib like panache, resteasy etc… and performance are amazing too which comes as a bonus. But there is no dev out there. And I feel that in Java people want to work on Spring Boot because spending X years working on Spring Boot are more valuable in their career than X years on something else that is not really the de facto standard of the industry. So ya not great for hiring talented people…

But NestJS with the JS/TS ecosystem start to be very close to what Rails was in the past. Stuff like Prisma for instance makes everything a breeze. There is almost always a package for the thing you want. Great at websocket too. Can do GraphQL if it’s your thing. Same language as the front end, Nextjs, etc. One of the most performant dynamic languages. And interesting things happening like Deno or using Rust with it. So there are quite some perks to it.

Can’t speak about Django though. But I am wondering how is the dev experience like when we use it for real projects.

I am starting a new project/startup and wondering which one to start it with between all these technologies. And after looking for a long time I can see that they really all comes with their pros and cons.

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

#378

Post by saurik »

timerol wrote: post #289
dilippkumar wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm pretty sure that maintaining a C++ codebase is less than 7.7 times more expensive than Node, even if you throw in extra development time etc. The problem here is assuming that a 7.7x less expensive AWS bill is the same value as a 7.7x more expensive development time. Imagine an app that is maintained by one programmer costing $10k a month and running in AWS for $1k a month. It is not worth dividing that AWS cos…

FWIW, AWS is expensive... but mostly for networking and then second to that storage, with the cost for actual computation usually being a pretty small percentage of my overall spend. The only time I have seen computation itself be an interesting expense is when I am looking for some complicated hardware, such as their GPU or FPGA instances. That said, money is money... but it is much easier to figure out fun ways to save storage or bandwidth when the code is a bit more nimble, so I'm not sure I could justify larger teams or slower iteration times just to save on CPU.

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

#379

Post by jdlshore »

jjnoakes wrote: post #354
jdlshore wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd prefer something with a more sound type system, and something that makes cleaning up resources easier and more ergonomic. This might help with cleanup: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen... But I'm not sure anything will help with the type system. For example, this drives me absolutely insane: https://www.typescriptlang.org/play#code/MYewdgziA2CmB00QHMA...

> makes cleaning up resources easier

I've never really had a problem with it, but I isolate such resources behind a wrapper, which makes cleanup easy. I just create a little higher-order function:

  function doSomethingThatNeedsCleanup(fn) {
    const thing = createTheThing();
    try {
      return fn(thing);
    }
    finally {
      cleanUpTheThing(thing);
    }
  }
> this drives me absolutely insane (console.log(["10", "10", "10"].map(parseInt) outputs [10, NaN, 2])

That's not really an issue with the type system, that's just coincidence and bad luck.

The signature of parseInt is:

  parseInt(string: string, radix?: number | undefined): number
And Array.map(fn) takes a function with the signature:

  fn(element: string, index?: number | undefined, array?: string[] | undefined): any
So parseInt coincidentally matches the signature Array.map() is looking for.

I'm not sure what you expect the type system to do here. It works just fine at catching an actual type error, such as this:

  console.log([10, 10, 10].map(parseInt)
...which correctly complains:

  Argument of type '(string: string, radix?: number | undefined) => number' is not assignable to parameter of type '(value: number, index: number, array: number[]) => number'.
    Types of parameters 'string' and 'value' are incompatible.
      Type 'number' is not assignable to type 'string'.
(As I'm sure you know, this is the correct code: `console.log(["10", "10", "10"].map(s => parseInt(s))` .)
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