Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust

Post by mathw » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 1:54 PM UTC

zorkian wrote: post #245

PeterCorless wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tradeoffs with all languages. C++ avoids the GC, but you then have to make sure you know how to avoid the common pitfalls of that language. We use C++ at Scylla (saw that we got a shout-out in the blog! Woot!) but it's not like there isn't a whole industry about writing blogs avoiding C++ pitfalls. C++ pitfalls through the years... • https://www.horstmann.com/cpp/pitfalls.html (1997) • https://stackoverflow…

(Discord infra person here.) Actually we didn't update the reference to Cassandra in the article -- the read states workload is now on Scylla too, as of last week. ;) We'll be writing up a blog post on our migration with Scylla at some point in the next few months, but we've been super happy with it. I replaced our TokuMX cluster with it and it's faster, more reliable, _and_ cheaper (including the support contract).…

Post by juskrey » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

Post by qaq » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

koffiezet wrote: post #584

Tomis02 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landing in a shop that uses N programming languages for N microservices would be a pretty miserable experience.

I've seen quite a few environments, and usually there's only a limited current set of tech the devs are allowed to use, and if that's not the case, I try to enforce this, but this set should evolve depending on the needs. The main issue however is manpower. At my current client, one of the technologies still actively being used for this reason is PHP (which is a horrible fit for microservices for a lot of reasons), b…

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

chubs wrote: post #307

dochtman wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One the one hand, yes. On the other hand, all of this sounds much more complex and fragile. This seems like an important point to me: "Remarkably, we had only put very basic thought into optimization as the Rust version was written. Even with just basic optimization, Rust was able to outperform the hyper hand-tuned Go version."

I found similarly when I ported an image resizing algorithm from Swift to Rust: I'm experienced in swift thus was able to write in an idiomatic way, and have little Rust experience thus I wrote it in a naive way; yet still the rust algorithm was twice(!) as fast. And swift doesn't even have a GC slowing things down!

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

corford wrote: post #439

tormeh wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

D, Nim and Crystal all do very well on all metrics. Author finds Rust pretty close but not as maintainable. Interesting that the top 3 (performance close to C++, but more maintainable) all are niche languages that haven't really broken into the mainstream.

I really wish Intel or MS or someone would fund D so it could give Go and Rust a run for their money. It's as fast (or faster), expressive, powerful and, subjectively, easier to pick up and code in than Rust. It just needs some backers with muscle.