Removed rust to gain speed
prisma.io
Removed rust to gain speed
1–10 of 69 posts
Re: Removed rust to gain speed
#2This is a decent example of not buying, getting pulled, or being forced into any corporate pushed hype or eliminating one's options. They re-evaluated and looked at what programming language was best for their situation, which was removing the Rust language and using something else. It then turned out, they actually got gains in greater user contributions, simplicity, efficiency, and even speed.
Re: Removed rust to gain speed
#3[deleted]
Re: Removed rust to gain speed
#4PSA: detached floating panels are pure cancer. Avoid them.
I literally can't scroll through your website.
Re: Removed rust to gain speed
#5This is a decent example of not buying, getting pulled, or being forced into any corporate pushed hype or eliminating one's options. They re-evaluated and looked at what programming language was best for their situation, which was removing the Rust language and using something else. It then turned out, they actually got gains in greater user contributions, simplicity, efficiency, and even speed.
> what programming language was best for their situation, which was removing the Rust language and using something else
This is correct, but I'd say that the key was removing Rust and not using something else. Fewer moving parts, fewer JS runtime boundaries to cross, no need to make certain that the GC won't interfere, etc.
Also, basically any rewrite is a chance to drop entrenched decisions that proved to be not as great. Rewriting a large enough part of Prisma likely allowed to address quite a few pieces of tech debt which were not comfortable to address in small incremental changes. Consider "Prisma requires ~98% fewer types to evaluate a schema. Prisma requires ~45% fewer types for query evaluation.": this mush have required quite a bit of rework of the whole thing. Removing Rust in the process was likely almost a footnote.
Re: Removed rust to gain speed
#6This is a decent example of not buying, getting pulled, or being forced into any corporate pushed hype or eliminating one's options. They re-evaluated and looked at what programming language was best for their situation, which was removing the Rust language and using something else. It then turned out, they actually got gains in greater user contributions, simplicity, efficiency, and even speed.
> This is a decent example of not buying, getting pulled, or being forced into any corporate pushed hype
It seems that maybe they did get hyped into Rust, because it's not clear why they believed Rust would make their JavaScript tool easier to develop, simpler, or more efficient in the first place.
Re: Removed rust to gain speed
#7This is a decent example of not buying, getting pulled, or being forced into any corporate pushed hype or eliminating one's options. They re-evaluated and looked at what programming language was best for their situation, which was removing the Rust language and using something else. It then turned out, they actually got gains in greater user contributions, simplicity, efficiency, and even speed.
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Re: Removed rust to gain speed
#8I'm in the "Pro-Rust" camp (not fanboy level "everything must be rewritten in rust", but "the world would be a better place if more stuff used Rust"), and I love this post.
They saw some benefits to Rust, tried it, and continued to measure. They identified the Typescript/Rust language boundary was slow, and noticed an effect on their contributions. After further research, they realized there was a faster way that didn't need the Rust dependency.
Good stuff, good explanation!
Re: Removed rust to gain speed
#9Good. Rust is fine, but it makes you pay a complexity tax for manual memory management that you just don't need most of the time. In almost all real world cases, a GC is fine. TypeScript is a memory-safe language, just like Rust, and I can't imagine a database ORM of all things needing manual memory management to get good performance. (Talking to the database, not memory management, is the bottleneck!)
Re: Removed rust to gain speed
#10PSA: detached floating panels are pure cancer. Avoid them. I literally can't scroll through your website.
So tell them ... posting it here is useless; the article was written a couple of weeks ago and they may not even know that it made it to HN.