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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

#381

Post by itishappy »

ReflectedImage wrote: post #367
tcfhgj wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It won't because the number #1 factor in bugs is the number of lines. The Python code will be significantly shorter and thus contain less bugs.

That feels a bit overly reductive. I have a hard time believing GolfScript and APL are among the least error prone languages, for example.

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

#382

Post by xyzzy4747 »

worik wrote: post #328
CuriouslyC wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it doesn't have the batteries, typescript's gradual typing is much nicer than python's, so for some use cases it's a better language. All languages come with tradeoffs in terms of performance, development/maintenance cost and ease of hiring. Most businesses only care superficially about performance, which leaves developer productivity and ease of hiring. Node/typescript isn't terrible in terms of developer prod…

> typescript's gradual typing is much nicer than python's, It is not Node V. Python, but Node V Java Python is a terrible choice as a backend, too. It has a place as a scripting language, but so often it is used to build complete systems. They suck.

Python is suitable if you don't care about performance, type safety, or async programming. That is to say, it's usually not a good choice.

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

#383

Post by nazka »

julianeon wrote: post #315

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,…

I am a Rust fanboy but using it to start a startup hmm unless it’s for a specific use case. No. Why? Because the biggest bill you will have to pay at first in a startup and for a long time won’t be AWS but all the (devs) salaries. And compare to what you will pay to AWS that’s a lot of money. So a gain in performance won’t matter as much as in your success (and survivability) than speed in developing new feature every week.

Depending what you do but it’s usually the case that performance won’t matter until mid late game. I saw a startup at +300M valuation still not having to worry about performance for a long time. And a cut in the AWS bill thanks to using a more performant language like Rust won’t make that much a difference compare to how much they had to pay devs. So you just want a language where you can ship features fast.

Also the hiring pool is still very small.

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

#384

Post by xyzzy4747 »

8note wrote: post #341
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 find typescript makes the most common things I do in business app software as straightforward as possible. That is, making copies of objects with slightly different structure to pass them to some other system. Typescript is just fantastic for plumbing. To do the same in java means making a billion model files with a billion transformation functions on them

Yup. I view TypeScript as the best "get things done quickly without too much code and minimal bugs" language.

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

#385

Post by doodlesdev »

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...

  > 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...
You just gave me CPTSD, thank you. This motivated me enough so that I will leave JavaScript and TypeScript for good now.

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

#386

Post by dragonwriter »

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...

Oh, god, the “you can call it with one arg, but it really has more, and then you tried to use map, you poor fool” trap.

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

#387

Post by dilippkumar »

saurik wrote: post #378
timerol wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

What portion of the bandwidth is end-user facing and what portion of it is connecting all the servers? Another way of asking this is if I need fewer servers because code runs faster, how much less bandwidth do I need?

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

#388

Post by saurik »

dilippkumar wrote: post #387
saurik wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. What portion of the bandwidth is end-user facing and what portion of it is connecting all the servers? Another way of asking this is if I need fewer servers because code runs faster, how much less bandwidth do I need?

AWS doesn't charge for internal server-to-server transfers, so the answer is precisely 0.

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

#389

Post by rixed »

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…

> and the libraries for web backend stuff are the same things Google uses internally, so they're well-tested.

Internally Google uses no web and most of the backends are in C++.

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

#390

Post by tbillington »

ngrilly wrote: post #300
oconnor663 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, ask the C++ community. They've had exceptions forever, but a large chunk of them forbid exceptions in their codebases. I think there's a pretty good rule of thumb in modern systems-ish language design: If Go and Rust and Zig all do a certain thing, that thing is probably a great idea. These languages have very different priorities, but often they overlap.

Zig, unlike Go and Rust, provides an error return trace showing how the error bubbled up. This is a really interesting idea. https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Error-Return-Trace...

go and rust both have this, though opt in at each location you're adding context.
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