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If a rewrite is warranted, and despite Rust zealotry being annoying at times I think it has fair points, I think going for something even more hipster than Rust

If a rewrite is warranted, and despite Rust zealotry being annoying at times I think it has fair points, I think going for something even more hipster than Rust would be a mistake. I wouldn't even call Rust "hipster" anymore. It's already been embraced and rolled out to production by big companies working on hard techinical problems (Cloudflare, AWS, Discord), as well as the crypto community. I think the reasons from steering away from hipster languages for these critical projects are roughly the same ones we use to justify not using hipster crypto for critical, real-world applications

KingOfCoders 6y ago
I also would call Rust the new normal for fast secure code.
- johnisgood 6y ago
  I still do not understand. Ada is not exactly new. Have you ever seriously considered Ada/SPARK? Might want to give https://www.adacore.com/uploads/books/pdf/AdaCore-Tech-Cyber-Security-web.pdf https://www.adacore.com/uploads/books/pdf/AdaCore-Tech-Cyber... a read, or even https://blog.adacore.com/ https://blog.adacore.com/, or my previous comments on Ada. I called Ada the programming language for writing "fast secure code" for quite a long time now, a "better C" in that regard.
  - adamnemecek 6y ago
    Ada just doesn't have the steam behind it.
    - johnisgood 6y ago
      It certainly lacks the hype, and judging by the comments on here, many people still have loads and loads of misconceptions of the language, negative ones, unlike say Rust's "unsafe code does not affect the rest of the program", for example, which I would call a positive misconception. And of course thus, it also lacks libraries. This is really my biggest problem with it. :/
- 59nadir 6y ago
  Rust isn't nearly popular enough to be referred to as "the new normal" in any field or context. One would have to be in a very closed off bubble to think it is. If they haven't made some big strides with having it certified for use there are entire industries where you can't even use it and get certification, if I understand correctly.
bananaface 6y ago
I wouldn't really call Discord a hard problem. It's web chat.
- Volt 6y ago
  You might have missed the "technical" qualifier. Twitter isn't an especially hard problem either.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    I didn't miss the qualifier. Discord is a chat client with very restricted servers. It's really not that hard as technical problems go.
    - luizfelberti 6y ago
      Please, do tell us what kind of exotic problems you work on, that you think massive scale real-time communications is not a hard technical problem We're eager to know!
      - bananaface 6y ago
        No, that's stupid. I couldn't build Discord. My point is that as relative problems go, I don't see Discord as a big one. I might be wrong but as far as I can tell it's a solved problem and has been for over a decade. I'd wager you could build it with an incompetent team that had domain expertise. AWS is orders of magnitude more complicated than Discord. Frankly, so is World of Warcraft. What does Discord do that wasn't solved in 2005?
        dodobirdlord 6y ago
        > AWS is orders of magnitude more complicated than Discord. Frankly, so is World of Warcraft. AWS maybe, insomuch as "orders of magnitude" can mean as little as "100x". But still, unconvinced. There's something like 200 AWS services, and Discord on the whole is certainly more than twice as complex as the average AWS service. World of Warcraft being >100x more complex than Discord doesn't track. > What does Discord do that wasn't solved in 2005? Perhaps you are unaware that Discord has (pretty high quality!) voicechat and livestreaming? Certainly much better than anything that existed in 2005.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

I also would call Rust the new normal for fast secure code.

johnisgood 6y ago
I still do not understand. Ada is not exactly new. Have you ever seriously considered Ada/SPARK? Might want to give https://www.adacore.com/uploads/books/pdf/AdaCore-Tech-Cyber-Security-web.pdf https://www.adacore.com/uploads/books/pdf/AdaCore-Tech-Cyber... a read, or even https://blog.adacore.com/ https://blog.adacore.com/, or my previous comments on Ada. I called Ada the programming language for writing "fast secure code" for quite a long time now, a "better C" in that regard.
- adamnemecek 6y ago
  Ada just doesn't have the steam behind it.
  - johnisgood 6y ago
    It certainly lacks the hype, and judging by the comments on here, many people still have loads and loads of misconceptions of the language, negative ones, unlike say Rust's "unsafe code does not affect the rest of the program", for example, which I would call a positive misconception. And of course thus, it also lacks libraries. This is really my biggest problem with it. :/
59nadir 6y ago
Rust isn't nearly popular enough to be referred to as "the new normal" in any field or context. One would have to be in a very closed off bubble to think it is. If they haven't made some big strides with having it certified for use there are entire industries where you can't even use it and get certification, if I understand correctly.

bananaface 6y ago

I wouldn't really call Discord a hard problem. It's web chat.

Volt 6y ago
You might have missed the "technical" qualifier. Twitter isn't an especially hard problem either.
- bananaface 6y ago
  I didn't miss the qualifier. Discord is a chat client with very restricted servers. It's really not that hard as technical problems go.
  - luizfelberti 6y ago
    Please, do tell us what kind of exotic problems you work on, that you think massive scale real-time communications is not a hard technical problem We're eager to know!
    - bananaface 6y ago
      No, that's stupid. I couldn't build Discord. My point is that as relative problems go, I don't see Discord as a big one. I might be wrong but as far as I can tell it's a solved problem and has been for over a decade. I'd wager you could build it with an incompetent team that had domain expertise. AWS is orders of magnitude more complicated than Discord. Frankly, so is World of Warcraft. What does Discord do that wasn't solved in 2005?
      - dodobirdlord 6y ago
        > AWS is orders of magnitude more complicated than Discord. Frankly, so is World of Warcraft. AWS maybe, insomuch as "orders of magnitude" can mean as little as "100x". But still, unconvinced. There's something like 200 AWS services, and Discord on the whole is certainly more than twice as complex as the average AWS service. World of Warcraft being >100x more complex than Discord doesn't track. > What does Discord do that wasn't solved in 2005? Perhaps you are unaware that Discord has (pretty high quality!) voicechat and livestreaming? Certainly much better than anything that existed in 2005.