3 ms·

If any Cloudflare engineers are here, why is Rust not chosen as main language for such use cases?

acdha 9y ago
I like Rust too but it's a newer language and the Cloudflare team has a history of using Go since it's targeted pretty squarely at their kind of work. In the case of doing benchmarks, it's especially unhelpful to make that suggestion since the point of a benchmark is to learn where the limits are rather than an invitation to port everything to a different language to avoid a problem which might remain theoretical forever.
- staticassertion 9y ago
  I don't think they're trying to suggest using rust, just curious why Cloudflare chose a language with a GC for workloads that apparently do not play well with GC. "We already used Go" is a totally valid reason. "It's rare (or as you say potentially never an issue) that we actually need to avoid GC" is another.
  - khc 9y ago
    the context of the benchmark is https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/ (Cloudflare engineer but I have nothing to do with the recent blog posts)
  - acdha 9y ago
    “why is Rust not chosen as main language” seemed like an unnecessarily accusatory way to express that idea, especially given that language choices are usually driven by a number of factors rather than a single benchmark. I've seen a lot of advocacy over the years like that which has seemed to inspire more backlash than adoption. I generally prefer something constructive in the tradition of showing a better way to do something — i.e. in this case, perhaps show a Rust crypto library which delivers better performance so people could judge whether that kind of thing is enough of a draw to be worth migrating or, in the case of Rust, taking advantage of its embedding characteristics.
    - tuyguntn 9y ago
      First of all, I am not advocating using Rust, I am asking why they didn't choose language without GC and good performance for given use case. “why is Rust not chosen as main language” seemed like an unnecessarily accusatory way to express that idea, especially given that language choices are usually driven by a number of factors rather than a single benchmark. do not cut the context, I said "why is Rust not chosen as main language ---> for such use cases? <---". By use case I meant writing performant code without GC
jgrahamc 9y ago
These tests are looking at our current code/workload. So we are testing how they perform under different circumstances. We could switch to another language but that would require rewriting large chunks of code. We've done that in the past and will likely to it in future. Rust is certainly interesting for our situation.

I like Rust too but it's a newer language and the Cloudflare team has a history of using Go since it's targeted pretty squarely at their kind of work. In the case of doing benchmarks, it's especially unhelpful to make that suggestion since the point of a benchmark is to learn where the limits are rather than an invitation to port everything to a different language to avoid a problem which might remain theoretical forever.

staticassertion 9y ago
I don't think they're trying to suggest using rust, just curious why Cloudflare chose a language with a GC for workloads that apparently do not play well with GC. "We already used Go" is a totally valid reason. "It's rare (or as you say potentially never an issue) that we actually need to avoid GC" is another.
- khc 9y ago
  the context of the benchmark is https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/ (Cloudflare engineer but I have nothing to do with the recent blog posts)
- acdha 9y ago
  “why is Rust not chosen as main language” seemed like an unnecessarily accusatory way to express that idea, especially given that language choices are usually driven by a number of factors rather than a single benchmark. I've seen a lot of advocacy over the years like that which has seemed to inspire more backlash than adoption. I generally prefer something constructive in the tradition of showing a better way to do something — i.e. in this case, perhaps show a Rust crypto library which delivers better performance so people could judge whether that kind of thing is enough of a draw to be worth migrating or, in the case of Rust, taking advantage of its embedding characteristics.
  - tuyguntn 9y ago
    First of all, I am not advocating using Rust, I am asking why they didn't choose language without GC and good performance for given use case. “why is Rust not chosen as main language” seemed like an unnecessarily accusatory way to express that idea, especially given that language choices are usually driven by a number of factors rather than a single benchmark. do not cut the context, I said "why is Rust not chosen as main language ---> for such use cases? <---". By use case I meant writing performant code without GC

jgrahamc 9y ago

These tests are looking at our current code/workload. So we are testing how they perform under different circumstances. We could switch to another language but that would require rewriting large chunks of code. We've done that in the past and will likely to it in future. Rust is certainly interesting for our situation.