Zero to Production in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: Zero to Production in Rust

#41

Post by scns » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

rattray wrote: post #12

autarch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "too slow" is "too slow to onboard juniors", not "too slow in terms of performance".

Correct – it took about 6 months for people to become fully productive in Rust, which matches what I've heard elsewhere. Though I will note that the Rust compilation times were also far more painful than I'd expected – even the tiny (~5k sloc) app at hand would take what felt like a minute to recompute the red squigglies in my editor. TS felt slow if it took 5-15sec, and Sorbet (for Ruby) was usually Rust was in the…

By the same author, nay help: https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/fast-rust-docker-builds/

Re: Zero to Production in Rust

#42

Post by zinclozenge » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

jkelleyrtp wrote: post #38

Thaxll wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"good concurrency" Async rust is very messy and a pretty big issue atm. The tooling on the IDE side is subpar compared to Go.

To write custom futures? Yes, you need to understand Pin and some advanced stuff. To use? Eh - I just turn on async_std with the Tokio flag and write go-like code with async tasks. No issues thus far.

What's the deal with cancellations? If you're coming from Go, the context package makes it convenient to do.

Re: Zero to Production in Rust

#43

Post by brundolf » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

davnicwil wrote: post #39

I'm pretty interested in learning rust to build APIs, but I'm already productive with Java and Node/Typescript and wonder if it would be worth it, aside from being interesting. Anyone up for giving me an elevator pitch that it would be? Or, also interested in confirmation that it wouldn't!

Either:

1) Latency/peformance/concurrency/server costs

or

2) Extreme correctness

If neither of these things is a current or anticipated problem for you, it may not be worth it (though you could always do an exploratory project to find out!). Make no mistake: like any engineering decision, for all its advantages it does come with some costs.

Re: Zero to Production in Rust

#44

Post by sbeckeriv » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

davnicwil wrote: post #39

I'm pretty interested in learning rust to build APIs, but I'm already productive with Java and Node/Typescript and wonder if it would be worth it, aside from being interesting. Anyone up for giving me an elevator pitch that it would be? Or, also interested in confirmation that it wouldn't!

Learn it because you are interested. If nothing else you take back something you learn to another language. The zero2prod has a nice 38 page sample. I'm not sure how zero is for someone who has never written rust.

Re: Zero to Production in Rust

#45

Post by beforeolives » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

cjg wrote: post #31

cjpearson wrote: post #3

So I've just tinkered around a bit in Rust, and I'm not intimately familiar with the language. My experience has been pretty good, but I don't see how it's a good fit for the web domain. At least not the enterprisey, CRUD, business apps I'm used to building. I'd be curious to hear from people who have been using Rust for their web backends, though. Beyond the classic selling points of speed and safety, what benefits…

We are using Rust for backend web development and other things. For us, the safety is the critical reason to choose Rust - particularly the thread-safety. Also the relatively small memory footprint compared to something like Java. Performance hasn't driven our decision at all - the number of requests per second is very low. It's correctness that matters. We are a bit unusual because customers have locally deployed se…

Any reason to choose Rust over Go in your case?

Re: Zero to Production in Rust

#46

Post by mdtusz » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #37

cjg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are using Rust for backend web development and other things. For us, the safety is the critical reason to choose Rust - particularly the thread-safety. Also the relatively small memory footprint compared to something like Java. Performance hasn't driven our decision at all - the number of requests per second is very low. It's correctness that matters. We are a bit unusual because customers have locally deployed se…

What web framework do you use? This to me seems like the part that's least-baked at this stage. Iron doesn't support async if I recall correctly, actix supposedly has a complicated mental model and was mired in drama last I checked, and Rocket looks promising but is still in the somewhat-early stages.

Check out tide. It's still very early days for it, but is in my opinion the easiest to use and I'm betting in the long term will win out as the "express" of the rust world. It has very straightforward routing and middleware semantics which covers the majority of the "base" needs for most web server backends.

Re: Zero to Production in Rust

#47

Post by Cyph0n » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

foobarbazetc wrote: post #30

jkelleyrtp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DB space for Rust is a bit young, though there are several good projects like sqlx making it much more pleasant. Rust shares many of the benefits of Go: - statically linked binaries for ease of deployment - good concurrency - builtin testing framework But it's a much sharper tool than Go: - Really great error handling with Result/Option and the ? marker - Like, really really good error handling, esp compared to G…

I personally prefer Rust to Go for things that have hard resource requirements/limits, but there’s no denying that Go is much easier to program than Rust. You don’t need to know much more than Python/Ruby to get something done in Go, whereas Rust needs a C++ or Scala or Haskell or whatever background. Rust places too much mental workload on a programmer to make the compiler happy. The Go compiler is much more human f…

Can you expand on “needs a C++ or Scala or Haskell background”? C++ would probably help you appreciate what Rust brings to the table, but I don’t see how any of them fit in when learning to use Rust in practice.

Re: Zero to Production in Rust

#48

Post by jtwebman » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

davnicwil wrote: post #39

I'm pretty interested in learning rust to build APIs, but I'm already productive with Java and Node/Typescript and wonder if it would be worth it, aside from being interesting. Anyone up for giving me an elevator pitch that it would be? Or, also interested in confirmation that it wouldn't!

I could see Rust playing a role in microservises where maybe you have a cpu bound service like dealing with logins being in Rust but my guess is it still isn't worth the extra cost to develop and maintain over just scaling that service unless you are getting Facebook/Google level over Java. Still fun to learn though!

Re: Zero to Production in Rust

#49

Post by cjpearson » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

cjg wrote: post #31

cjpearson wrote: post #3

So I've just tinkered around a bit in Rust, and I'm not intimately familiar with the language. My experience has been pretty good, but I don't see how it's a good fit for the web domain. At least not the enterprisey, CRUD, business apps I'm used to building. I'd be curious to hear from people who have been using Rust for their web backends, though. Beyond the classic selling points of speed and safety, what benefits…

We are using Rust for backend web development and other things. For us, the safety is the critical reason to choose Rust - particularly the thread-safety. Also the relatively small memory footprint compared to something like Java. Performance hasn't driven our decision at all - the number of requests per second is very low. It's correctness that matters. We are a bit unusual because customers have locally deployed se…

Training internally makes a lot of sense, but it's also a huge hurdle and expense if your developers don't already have rust experience.

What was the process of proposing rust and getting buy-in like?

Re: Zero to Production in Rust

#50

Post by cjg » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #37

cjg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are using Rust for backend web development and other things. For us, the safety is the critical reason to choose Rust - particularly the thread-safety. Also the relatively small memory footprint compared to something like Java. Performance hasn't driven our decision at all - the number of requests per second is very low. It's correctness that matters. We are a bit unusual because customers have locally deployed se…

What web framework do you use? This to me seems like the part that's least-baked at this stage. Iron doesn't support async if I recall correctly, actix supposedly has a complicated mental model and was mired in drama last I checked, and Rocket looks promising but is still in the somewhat-early stages.

We've been using Actix.

We evaluated several frameworks and liked the model that Actix has and also its relative maturity (for example documentation / examples). It has been pretty straightforward to work with - including doing things like custom authentication and REST endpoints that dynamically exist.

For the drama, I guess you are talking about the situation that used to exist where Actix had hundreds of unsafe blocks. That's pretty much resolved now, with perhaps a handful of performance critical unsafe blocks left.