Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33714007

> the service we were building was a fairly straightforward CRUD app. The expected load on this service was going to be on the order no more than a few queries per second, max, through the lifetime of this particular system. The service was a frontend to a fairly elaborate data-processing pipeline that could take many hours to run, so the service itself was not expected to be a performance bottleneck. There was no particular concern that a conventional language like Python would have any trouble delivering good performance.

Yeah, that's not the kind of thing you use low level stuff for. Ruby on Rails or Node or Elixir, or whatever Java thing is going to let you iterate faster than a lower level language.

Rust has brought so many great ideas into the programming mainstream. It is a shame that it has also attracted such a community around it that seems to project all sorts of hopes and wishes into the language.

I don't get how someone could think making a CRUD app in Rust could ever be a good idea (beyond hobby projects). That is just not playing to the strengths of the languages at all.

If you CAN use a language with automatic garbage collection for your project, do that. Always. If not, sure, Rust or whatever else language is in that space can be a good choice for embedded development or game dev or whatever. That should be common sense. No need for an article.

I hope for the sake of Rust that the hype around it will die soon so that it can become a pragmatic choice for certain projects.

One question though: What does Garbage collection do besides what Rust provide? Ownership and borrow checker.