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Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

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Re: Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

#81

Post by withoutboats3 »

wredue wrote: post #68
godzillabrennus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like RUST needs work to become easier to learn. Hard for a business to take a risk on using it (outside of a use case absolutely needing a memory safe language) if the talent pool is shallow.

Honestly. Rust is not all that “difficult”. There’s just SO MUCH that you MUST know to be effective. You need to know all of the rustisms. Plus you need to have a general knowledge of memory. You need to understand how memory is being abstracted and how to work within those constraints so as not to be slow. You need to know all of the monads, what they mean, why each exists, what the nuance is, and why you might use…

"Dwarf"? "Dwarf"?! I may be biased (because I am very effective at Rust and terrible at C++) but I can't believe this seems probable. std::optional, move semantics, boost, template templates, SFINAE(!!) C++ has all the expressivity of Rust and more, with far less regulation to assist the programmer in using it effectively.

Re: Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

#82

Post by josephg »

adamnemecek wrote: post #75
godzillabrennus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like RUST needs work to become easier to learn. Hard for a business to take a risk on using it (outside of a use case absolutely needing a memory safe language) if the talent pool is shallow.

Learning Rust to the point of being productive is 100x easier than C or C++. It's not even funny.

That hasn’t been my experience with it. I found rust significantly harder to learn than C; and this is after I already knew C. (At least - learn rust to the point of feeling productive, and like I wasn’t fighting the borrow checker constantly).

Arguably becoming an expert in C means you need to understand all the nuances of undefined behaviour. And that’s a much harder process. But it can happen slowly. Rust preloads all the pain. You essentially can’t write rust at all until you understand rust references, lifetimes (implicit and explicit) and the borrowchecker. The payoff is huge, but I found climbing that mountain to be no joke.

Re: Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

#83

Post by adrr »

Merad wrote: post #12
chiph wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this is the .NET runtime + libraries, not applications written in C#.

No, they're looking at migrating some core Office 365 services to Rust. This is the job posting: https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1633482/Pri... At the scale of O365 it totally makes sense to look at a high performance non-GC language for your core systems that see the most traffic (I say this as a .Net dev).

Not sure microsoft’s problem is the language. Their frontend JavaScript code is bloated and slow. It makes office365 feel slow and there are so many bugs in the azure management tools. I assume the backend code has the same low quality.

Re: Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

#84

Post by adrianN »

josephg wrote: post #82
adamnemecek wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning Rust to the point of being productive is 100x easier than C or C++. It's not even funny.

That hasn’t been my experience with it. I found rust significantly harder to learn than C; and this is after I already knew C. (At least - learn rust to the point of feeling productive, and like I wasn’t fighting the borrow checker constantly). Arguably becoming an expert in C means you need to understand all the nuances of undefined behaviour. And that’s a much harder process. But it can happen slowly. Rust preloads…

Given the number of CVEs that can be directly attributed to C and C++ you only need to be half-joking to argue that approximately nobody has managed to learn the languages sufficiently to write production code in them.

Re: Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

#85

Post by davidmurdoch »

mmastrac wrote: post #20

I love writing Rust, but I was really surprised by how difficult it was to find a job _actually_ writing Rust. I'm happy to see the increased activity in the space, but searching for a job in Rust is probably still 10x harder than C or C++. It worked out in the end, and I'm happy to be getting paid to be writing Rust every day, but I hope that the market for Rust jobs continues to grow -- ideally even faster than it…

There are tons of Rust jobs in blockchain.

Re: Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

#86

Post by zahllos »

fortran77 wrote: post #22
timeon wrote: post #2

I upvote almost any post "in Rust" here (yeah that's me) but this story went bit too far. It was just one job posting and so many sites acts like MS is going to ditch C#.

That’s funny because I downvote almost any “in Rust” post here! C# — and garbage collected languages in general — aren’t going anywhere. With the shift to Arm, languages compiled for a runtime interpreter will get even more important for Microsoft.

I'm a Rust convert, but that needs to be put into context: I do stuff in in cryptography, often on embedded. Prior to Rust I did C and C++ for most of my work. There's also Ada... and it has SPARK, but Ada has never had the level of exposure that Rust has achieved.

But there's all manner of "business systems", e.g. Java/RHEL shops, ".net shops", where GC pauses don't matter, the code is something other than CPU/memory bound anyway,the GC/JIT are mature, and a human writing C++ likely can't do better and will probably do worse. I've seen this with a write-heavy log-ingesting system where the developers used smart pointers everywhere - which internally use atomic reference counting, which implies sync barriers for otherwise entirely unrelated data. I agree, these kinds of places are unlikely to move to Rust - the code writes faster in anything else and runs well. There's also Go, which has a GC but compiles natively, GraalVM, which is AOT compiled Java etc. I definitely agree GC'd languages are not going anywhere.

I'm not sure I agree with C# becoming more important because of ARM, though. I don't think it'll change much - I think shops already invested in certain stacks will mostly stick to them and for all Rust's popularity, it doesn't make sense to implement your CRM in it really. It does, however, make sense to reimplement the C++ parts of the .net runtime and miscellaneous other C and C++ parts of Windows that can benefit from the borrow checker, because it vastly reduces spatial memory safety bugs. There's a massive cost to this, but it's no longer just about about on-prem patching but Azure.

Re: Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

#87

Post by jonnytran »

rowanG077 wrote: post #69
TrackerFF wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We acquired a product last year, where the entire back-end was written in Rust. Unfortunately, Rust developers were hard to get by, and we didn't have any internally that could maintain the Rust code at such scale. The entire back-end ended up being re-written.

Why not just learn rust? It really is not that exotic to learn. I doubt it is faster to rewrite it.

Yeah, this is just baffling. A team can be so averse to learning new tools, good ones too, that they would rather dump their time into rewriting. Instead of getting paid to level up their skills, they'd rather block forward movement of the company's goals to maintain the status quo.

Re: Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

#88

Post by josephg »

candiddevmike wrote: post #50
xedrac wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given your username I suspect you're quite a bit older. I've mentored several grey beards on Rust and they weren't at all happy about it, at first. After a few months though, they were some of its strongest advocates. It's hard to not love Rust when you realize just how much pain it saves you from.

What pain does it save most folks from that are using GC languages (as GP alluded to)? Genuinely curious.

Weirdly enough, some of the worst memory leaks I’ve debugged in my career were in GCed languages. Because any object can reference anything, retaining references can hide anywhere in the code. (Including via closures and other exotic things you forget about). And because in GC languages we don’t often have a destructor (or anything like it), it’s very common for people to forget to clean up resources. (Eg filesystem handles, sockets, wasm object references, and so on).

One weird thing about rust is that network sockets and file handles are automatically closed when the handle drops out of scope. The borrow checker takes care of that. If you do the same thing in JavaScript (open a socket then do nothing), the program won’t even quit on its own and you’ll have no idea why.

Re: Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

#89

Post by Merad »

adrr wrote: post #83
Merad wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're looking at migrating some core Office 365 services to Rust. This is the job posting: https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1633482/Pri... At the scale of O365 it totally makes sense to look at a high performance non-GC language for your core systems that see the most traffic (I say this as a .Net dev).

Not sure microsoft’s problem is the language. Their frontend JavaScript code is bloated and slow. It makes office365 feel slow and there are so many bugs in the azure management tools. I assume the backend code has the same low quality.

I imagine the goal here is to optimize MS' compute and hosting costs. The core pieces of O365 probably handle many billions of requests per day. At that scale even small optimizations can be worth millions a year in cost savings.

Re: Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

#90

Post by helix278 »

cerved wrote: post #57
magicalhippo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. There's the IDisposable interface you can implement, and some language features around making it easy to use[2], however there's nothing preventing you from not using those language features and forgetting to call Dispose. In case you forget the GC will call Dispose but it's entirely up to the GC when that happens, so personally I wouldn't say it's similar. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fu…

Doesn't the compiler complain if you don't use using or try? I forget

There are warnings given by analyzers in some cases, but it's not exhaustive
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