18 ms·

Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

492 points by carllerche 6y ago

ibraheemdev 6y ago
It's nice to see another large Rust sponsor after the unfortunate layoffs at Mozilla
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  Mozilla management is completely clueless. KaiOS (ex FirefoxOS) is making a killing right now and has become the third most popular mobile OS, just behind Android and IOS. They fired the dev docs team, fired most rust devs and are mismanaging Firefox. Well maybe the people in charge are the ones that are not fit for the company...
  - cogman10 6y ago
    Crazy, didn't realize that was still a thing. All the phones that support it feel like throwbacks from 2003. (It's KaiOS, btw)
ibraheemdev 6y ago
Related: AWS is building a deep bench of Rust talent [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151056
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nicoburns 6y ago
I believe that's Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook all looking to get involved in core Rust development (I think partially triggered by the Mozilla layoffs). If anybody was still harbouring doubts about Rust's future, now is the time to lay them aside.
- johnnujler 6y ago
  Great thing but I feel these companies are just too clever for Rust. Rust is a developer’s delight and I don’t want it to become like C++, and I feel the C++ standard got worse especially after these so-called great companies became a part of the standards committee. Or take the example of Web, made worse after the Googles and the Apples of the world got in. So I have mixed feelings about too many clever people doing too many clever things to an awesome language.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    The language team is the sole group of people who decides how the language itself changes over time. Entry into that team is determined by the consensus of the team itself. Anyone can comment on proposals, and of course, a company could hire those individuals, but it's not possible to become a decision maker (or stay one) without the explict consent of the existing set of decision makers. That being said, we (that is, the Rust team broadly, I am not on the language team) do weigh companies' desires fairly heavily, because we want Rust to be used for real, important things by companies. But it's always a balance. Famously, the lang team even resisted some proposals by the Servo team way back in the day, even though most people involved on all sides were Mozilla employees at the time.
    - johnnujler 6y ago
      I am genuinely curious to know more about this. Some of these companies dedicate multiple teams towards an OSS project, which I’ve seen first hand with projects like llvm. So isn’t it possible that the involvement of these companies could actually systemically turn things as most of the people working would be their employees and that the scales could be manipulated easily by these companies(need not be intentional). For example I remember “std::string_view” in c++ being one example which Google pushed and even got into the C++17 standards despite its bad design. Although I might be wrong, but my guess here is that Google had a use for it(which we know it had) and that lot of people on the standards committee being from Google led to a systemic bias. Couldn’t that happen with Rust?
adamnemecek 6y ago
Mozilla should have spun-out a Rust consulting company.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  It still can
  - cogman10 6y ago
    Not really, they went and fired all their core Rust people.
    - sidlls 6y ago
      Those core Rust people could form such a consultancy. They have a ripe market of people willing to part with their cash for it.
      - cogman10 6y ago
        Bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. I agree the rust core folk could have done that and probably made a pretty penny. The issue is setting up a new consultancy business is more complex and inherently more risky than just taking a cushy job from the companies that will pay handsomely for their talents.
    - mlindner 6y ago
      Then why are a ton of the core Rust devs still Mozilla employees?
      - steveklabnik 6y ago
        Who? Name names please!
- azakai 6y ago
  I think that could have worked. There were ideas to do such a thing, as well as consulting around wasm and other stuff. I'm not sure why none of them were actually tried.
offtop5 6y ago
Great to see Rust won't be starved for support. Now someone needs to take over MDN . By far the best JavaScript documentation
- ibraheemdev 6y ago
  Why does someone need to take over MDN?
  - luhn 6y ago
    Firefox laid off the MDN team a couple months ago. https://mobile.twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333952 https://mobile.twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333...
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Mozilla doesn't have the money to keep supporting it
- codethief 6y ago
  I don't think MDN is going to go anywhere anytime soon. I remember someone on Twitter saying that there are enough people from other organizations who had already been involved in the MDN docs before the lay-offs at Mozilla and that these people will likely stay involved. Case in point: Both the MDN Github repos and the MDN docs (or at least all the pages I bothered to look at) show very recent activity: https://github.com/mdn/ https://github.com/mdn/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web (scroll all the way down to "Last modified") https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/A_re-introduction_to_JavaScript https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/A_re...
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Still helps to have paid employees working on it. I'm happy to see community involvement, but it's such a vital resource that deserves funding
ibraheemdev 6y ago
Is Mozilla going to continue sponsoring the Rust project for the forseeable future? After letting servo out [1] > Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed. Now it’s time for Servo to leave the nest! Is there any chance they do the same with the Rust language? Either way, Mozilla has done a huge amount of work to improve the systems programming field, and created an incredible language ecosystem in Rust.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  We are still in the process of setting up the Rust Foundation, and so you'll see who's sponsoring at that point.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Hopefully it will be more open with showing where the sponsorship money goes (I hope most of it will go to developers and Rust contributors like you) than other foundations that I don't want to name here.
    - steveklabnik 6y ago
      The foundation is being set up by the Rust team, to be clear. I think with "more open" you're suggesting that this is like, an offshoot of mofo or something.
      - xiphias2 6y ago
        I don't understand your answer completely, but I guess you know that the Mozilla execs are not the most trusted people right now by HN folks, so ,,offshot of mofo'' doesn't sound as good as Rust foundation by Rust core contributors :) Anyways I really hope it will be successful!
manchoz 6y ago
Because AWS doesn't have his own fancy language.
- joseluisq 6y ago
  Yeah, like those Gos, Javas, Kotlins, C Sharps and so on. A lot of fanciness rolling across companies.
- aDotInTheVoid 6y ago
  https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1248321281474408450 https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1248321281474408450
  - ibraheemdev 6y ago
    CloudFormation is not a language, it is a collection of cloud infrastructure
    - EdSchouten 6y ago
      This tweet is likely referring to the fact that you can place special constructs in the YAML/JSON files to add control flow, thereby making it a crude templating language.
  - ibraheemdev 6y ago
    Microsoft has Project Verona
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      Microsoft has C#, F# and Visual Basic that are rather more significant than Project Verona.
      - ibraheemdev 6y ago
        True but I was thinking more in the systems programming context
LukeEF 6y ago
Having developed and launched a database (TerminusDB) built on a Rust core, this makes me slightly nervous. Feels like the evil empire will bring both great riches and great peril to the fantastic Rust community (part of the reason we picked Rust). Guaranteed sponsors for conferences, but also a certain malignant cynicism (am I being too harsh?). AWS will also aggressively compete for the best talent, which is tricky when you are small and open source.
- fulafel 6y ago
  Yep, Rust is especially vulnerable to featureitis because it's already a big language. The more surface area, the more breeding ground for temptations for growing the language. And in its current users a survivorship bias for new feature appetite.
- _greim_ 6y ago
  > AWS will also aggressively compete for the best talent, which is tricky when you are small and open source. Barring surges in demand at month-scale timelines, this isn't a zero sum game. Competition for Rust talent will result in an increase in the amount of Rust talent. Even better if you're open source; a growing population of Rust devs roaming the planet can only help you.
  - LukeEF 6y ago
    that is probably fair, I suppose comparing to the python world the financial folk soak up a lot of talent, but the open source ecosystem is stronger and better than ever.
k__ 6y ago
Good to read that. I really like AWS products and Rust is the first system programming language I'm really interested in.
ufmace 6y ago
If they really want to help, the most obvious first step would seem to be to formally adopt and throw some full-time resources at the Rusoto AWS library set for Rust. It's pretty usable right now, but would certainly benefit from the level of testing, helper methods, and language-specific additions that the officially supported AWS libs have.
- mjasay 6y ago
  It's a good call out, and one that we're actively engaged with. Matthew has done fantastic work on Rusoto and we'd like to be helpful there. Stay tuned.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    I'd love to see this as well. From a compiler perspective, Rusoto takes a long time to compile. Some of that is just the sheer volume of code, but also, it wouldn't surprise me if it's hitting bottlenecks in the compiler (e.g. a recently fixed issue in the performance of #[derive(...)] on a huge number of structs). Getting appropriate bits of Rusoto put into the compiler's performance testsuite could help, and profiling the compiler on it would likely turn up some areas for improvement. I would also love to see support for using Rusoto on non-Tokio runtimes. Given the amount of code generation used for Rusoto, abstracting over the remainder (such as the choice of async traits) based on a feature flag would hopefully be feasible.
    - kolektiv 6y ago
      And as a secondary thought around Rusoto (which is awesome, but could be even more so) - it would be great if we came up with some way of covering the non-HTTP/REST type services - for example, there are various streaming services (think speech to text, text to speech, etc.) which are simply not covered by Rusoto. So you can configure those services using Rusoto, but not use them. I've written a few medium-hacky clients for things like AWS Transcribe, but it would be great to... well, not have to. Rusoto is an awesome project though, huge thanks to those who've got it to where it is.
  - 6y ago
andrewmcwatters 6y ago
Am I just not "with it?" I don't see the appeal of Rust, but it gets the hottest talk in HN-town. Maybe it's just because I haven't worked long enough with C or C++ to complain about them (only about a decade or so), but I don't have any issues with those languages. And I find it wholly unappealing to abandon the existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems all in the name of whatever it is that Rust delivers on. I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and experiment with something I can't take off the shelf and be productive with from day one. I've also mentioned I just can't stand the way the language looks. It's ugly as sin, and I know I'm not alone in that opinion. I made some crude comments in a previous thread here on HN about Servo, but still came away with the feeling there was literally no one using Servo, the site didn't tell you how to actually use it, and no one cared, but the hype was unreal because it was web tech written in Rust. Edit: The points on this post are fluctuating wildly. If you're interested in Rust, could you share your knowledge with some of us who are on the fence like me instead of downvoting? It doesn't actually help me understand anything about the language or community other than I shouldn't criticize Rust because its users will downvote you.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  I haven't used it myself, but my understanding as an outsider is that a lot of the excitement around Rust is that it's bringing a new model of memory safety: with the borrow-checker, you can avoid the performance penalties of garbage collection, while also avoiding the bugs and security risks seen in C. People who care about such things are really hyped because it's a truly new idea in a mainstream(ish) language. https://willcrichton.net/notes/rust-memory-safety/ https://willcrichton.net/notes/rust-memory-safety/
- wwright 6y ago
  > but still came away with the feeling there was literally no one using Servo Code from Servo is in every single copy of Firefox, so it's pretty popular as code goes. > And I find it wholly unappealing to abandon the existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems all in the name of whatever it is that Rust delivers on. I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and play with toys. Rust doesn't throw away that corpus. Rust draws heavily on that corpus. It leverages LLVM (used to compile C/C++), integrates with C libraries, integrates with GDB, draws a ton of design decisions from actual experience using C++, and so on. It's a tool that runs inside Firefox, AWS, Microsoft, and a lot of other high-reliability, high-performance areas. It may be young, but it's quickly building (IMO compelling) evidence that it's very much not a "toy." ;)
bsaul 6y ago
So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ? I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust. This post is obviously from an engineer, but i fear the day business people will start looking into ways to leverage the contribution Amazon made to Rust.
- sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
  I don't think that's what's going on here. Swift and Go were both projects that Apple and Google respectively dedicated a lot of engineering resources to growing into mainstream popularity. AWS would have to spend a decade stewarding Rust the same way to get the same "halo effect".
- masklinn 6y ago
  > So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ? No? Project sponsorship, either direct or by hiring prominent contributors, have a long history in OSS support and have little to do with "owning" languages. Did Google or Dropbox take ownership of Python when they hired GvR? > I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust. What are you talking about? It's literally not their decision to make.
  - bsaul 6y ago
    Imagine Amazon keep hiring all the main contributors of the language and mainstream libraries, then decide to fork the language to add their own custom flavor, under their own conditions. We're still very far from that point, but i've seen worst things happened in the history of big megacorps.
- dagmx 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's a reasonable take. Apple and Google both use Rust too. Amazon also uses other languages. The languages you mentioned were developed in house by those companies, rust is independent
- roncohen 6y ago
  > This post is obviously from an engineer Not really. The post is by Matt Asay who's title is Head of Open Source Strategy and Marketing. The post reads like an attempt at improving upon the negative image AWS has garnered in open source by making money on open source projects without paying, or sometimes without even crediting, the authors. Most recent examples include Headless Recorder[1] and before that Kafka, Elasticsearch etc. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24799660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24799660
013a 6y ago
This is excellent; hopefully we get native Rust support on Lambda soon maybe? :)
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  In what sense? They released a runtime two years ago: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/rust-runtime-for-aws-lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/rust-runtime-for-aws...
  - bjohnso5 6y ago
    I think the parent commenter meant as a selectable runtime at deployment time (i.e. directly supported), rather than requiring the bring-your-own-runtime setup that is currently required.
    - JoshTriplett 6y ago
      I'm not sure how meaningful that would be. Selectable runtimes make a huge amount of sense for interpreted languages or languages with a runtime. Rust is compiled to a binary. There are libraries that make it easy to set up a Lambda runtime, and guides for deploying that runtime; beyond that, a Lambda runtime is "run this program, leave it running, answer requests", and I don't know how standardized that could easily become with a compiled language that doesn't need a runtime or interpreter.
astan 6y ago
Mixed feelings, on one hand, I'm so excited about the investment since I'm a big fan of Rust, on the other, I don't want it to be a clusterfuck like IETF and web standards development where companies like Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla get to dictate what is and isn't allowed on the web. I just hope the Rust community is able to stand up for itself and resist inclusion of unnecessary things against these big players with infinite resources.
- masklinn 6y ago
  > I don't want it to be a clusterfuck like IETF and web standards development where companies like Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla get to dictate what is and isn't allowed on the web. You may want to note that there's a pretty damn big difference between the two: the rust project needs to be interoperable with itself and that's about the extent of it. The web needs to be interoperable period, so if there isn't some sort of buy-in or the ability to push your weight around, spec-ing or implementing something is just a waste of time. Putting resources into the language doesn't mean you control it, and volunteer-driven projects go where they will. Python or Ruby are not owned by their sponsors.
rossmohax 6y ago
Twitter previously invested in Scala, which significantly contributed to it's adoption outside of relatively small community back then. Another part of success was Spark. It looks like Rust gains bigcorp support, all we need now is a killer product written in it to kick off explosive growth.
- ibraheemdev 6y ago
  I totally agree. If a large scale product is written primarily in Rust from the start, adoption in production environments and startups will increase dramatically.
- sitkack 6y ago
  Interviewing for a FAANG job in Rust.
mattgreg 6y ago
Want to work with Rust? Ockam.io loves Rust, and we are hiring! https://www.ockam.io/team#open-roles https://www.ockam.io/team#open-roles
- autarch 6y ago
  The read more button on https://www.ockam.io/team https://www.ockam.io/team is a 404 (to https://www.ockam.io/learn/guides/team/values_and_virtues_on_the_Ockam_Team https://www.ockam.io/learn/guides/team/values_and_virtues_on...). Also, there's an "Ockam Values" header right below with no content under it. Edit: but not if I go directly to the page. Maybe it was a transient Chrome bug.
  - db48x 6y ago
    All I see is blue with a header and footer, probably because my ad blocker blocks google tag manager.
s1k3s 6y ago
> Why AWS loves Rust Because it's cool and they want a spot on that poster?
renewiltord 6y ago
Do we already have a list of companies that will be sponsors of the Rust foundation?
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  There is no public list.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Cool. Thank you. Eager to find out in time, though I suspect the language will flourish regardless.
_J_Ten_ 6y ago
This is huge for Rust. I always had a love/hate relationship with Rust. Love for the language and runtime characteristics. The lack of stability of the ecosystem combined with the small standard lib and the enthusiats/hobbyist mindset (sorry, but that was my impression) was a show stopper for using it in business apps where Rust could be great but was not strictly necessary.
ThinkBeat 6y ago
Probably an unpopular opinion but I am not very excited by this. Getting funding and support is great, but the needs of the many are very different than the needs of AWS and Facebook. In my opinion we see this a lot in Linux as well. What Google wants has almost nothing to do with what I need. (I said almost). I think it should gestate a while in a less FAANGy environment.
- chabad360 6y ago
  It should be noted that programming languages are different from software. AWS is paying developers to primarily work on it's needs for Linux (as that is how Linux is generally maintained, you upstream a module, you maintain it). In Rust on the other hand (like most/all languages) new features tend to benefit everybody, AWS simply might be able to prioritize development of certain aspects, but they certainly don't get to make work almost exclusively for them.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Rust's popularity really is an incredible phenomenon. Amazon positioning itself as a big user and supporter of Rust is just good business. They do not want someone to appear more of a friend to Rust than they are.
ronlobo 6y ago
That's great news and will contribute further to Rusts' adoption. Large codebases will be able to transcode to language X at some point in the future and I am waiting for the day when it can be done for Rust with projects like https://github.com/facebookresearch/TransCoder/ https://github.com/facebookresearch/TransCoder/
intricatedetail 6y ago
They should pay contributors few millions of dollars each. If they benefited from it they should give meaningful reward. Mouthful words won't suddenly change you from being simply a leech.
- oxymoron 6y ago
  They have hired people who will be working specifically on rust. Just the names listed in the article amounts to millions of dollars invested yearly.
  - intricatedetail 6y ago
    But that should be millions per developer. Maybe developers should lobby RIAA, so that companies like Amazon would have to pay royalties for every line of code used. You know they make billions of off that work and yet some developers can't afford even their own place to live. This exploitation must end!
blub 6y ago
It feels like it was yesterday when HN was praising Tim Bray for quitting Amazon AWS [1] over the firing of whistleblowers. And on the other hand we have what appear to be several prominent Rust community members falling over each other to get hired by Amazon and the Rust HN community largely cheering Amazon. The Rust community seems quite desperate for corporate money and support. Amazon's not paying you out of love fellas, even if it says so in the blog post's title. [1] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-A...
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  The real world is a complicated thing. It is very possible to be critical of one part of an organization while working with another. Or even be critical of an organization you’re a part of! Nobody believes they are doing it solely out of love, but luckily, that’s not required for it to be a productive relationship.
secondcoming 6y ago
People talk about Rust like how people talk about alt-coins. It's really odd and emotional.
ashneo76 6y ago
If there is anyone here from the rust community, please please please stay away from amazon. There is nothing stopping amazon and aws. Any thing they do is evil. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196521 If there is an opencollective somewhere, I am not than happy to give you the money directly. I support Mozilla and Wikipedia and other projects to my best effort, and I would love it if others can do that too. All Amazon has ever done is lip service to open source. There is a multibillionaire at the top with no need for that money who every day costs not to do something good for the planet and is instead enabling commoditizing the general populace.

492 points by carllerche 6y ago

ibraheemdev 6y ago

It's nice to see another large Rust sponsor after the unfortunate layoffs at Mozilla

throw_m239339 6y ago
Mozilla management is completely clueless. KaiOS (ex FirefoxOS) is making a killing right now and has become the third most popular mobile OS, just behind Android and IOS. They fired the dev docs team, fired most rust devs and are mismanaging Firefox. Well maybe the people in charge are the ones that are not fit for the company...
- cogman10 6y ago
  Crazy, didn't realize that was still a thing. All the phones that support it feel like throwbacks from 2003. (It's KaiOS, btw)

ibraheemdev 6y ago

Related: AWS is building a deep bench of Rust talent [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151056

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nicoburns 6y ago

I believe that's Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook all looking to get involved in core Rust development (I think partially triggered by the Mozilla layoffs). If anybody was still harbouring doubts about Rust's future, now is the time to lay them aside.

johnnujler 6y ago
Great thing but I feel these companies are just too clever for Rust. Rust is a developer’s delight and I don’t want it to become like C++, and I feel the C++ standard got worse especially after these so-called great companies became a part of the standards committee. Or take the example of Web, made worse after the Googles and the Apples of the world got in. So I have mixed feelings about too many clever people doing too many clever things to an awesome language.
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  The language team is the sole group of people who decides how the language itself changes over time. Entry into that team is determined by the consensus of the team itself. Anyone can comment on proposals, and of course, a company could hire those individuals, but it's not possible to become a decision maker (or stay one) without the explict consent of the existing set of decision makers. That being said, we (that is, the Rust team broadly, I am not on the language team) do weigh companies' desires fairly heavily, because we want Rust to be used for real, important things by companies. But it's always a balance. Famously, the lang team even resisted some proposals by the Servo team way back in the day, even though most people involved on all sides were Mozilla employees at the time.
  - johnnujler 6y ago
    I am genuinely curious to know more about this. Some of these companies dedicate multiple teams towards an OSS project, which I’ve seen first hand with projects like llvm. So isn’t it possible that the involvement of these companies could actually systemically turn things as most of the people working would be their employees and that the scales could be manipulated easily by these companies(need not be intentional). For example I remember “std::string_view” in c++ being one example which Google pushed and even got into the C++17 standards despite its bad design. Although I might be wrong, but my guess here is that Google had a use for it(which we know it had) and that lot of people on the standards committee being from Google led to a systemic bias. Couldn’t that happen with Rust?

adamnemecek 6y ago

Mozilla should have spun-out a Rust consulting company.

kzrdude 6y ago
It still can
- cogman10 6y ago
  Not really, they went and fired all their core Rust people.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    Those core Rust people could form such a consultancy. They have a ripe market of people willing to part with their cash for it.
    - cogman10 6y ago
      Bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. I agree the rust core folk could have done that and probably made a pretty penny. The issue is setting up a new consultancy business is more complex and inherently more risky than just taking a cushy job from the companies that will pay handsomely for their talents.
  - mlindner 6y ago
    Then why are a ton of the core Rust devs still Mozilla employees?
    - steveklabnik 6y ago
      Who? Name names please!
azakai 6y ago
I think that could have worked. There were ideas to do such a thing, as well as consulting around wasm and other stuff. I'm not sure why none of them were actually tried.

offtop5 6y ago

Great to see Rust won't be starved for support. Now someone needs to take over MDN . By far the best JavaScript documentation

ibraheemdev 6y ago
Why does someone need to take over MDN?
- luhn 6y ago
  Firefox laid off the MDN team a couple months ago. https://mobile.twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333952 https://mobile.twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333...
- offtop5 6y ago
  Mozilla doesn't have the money to keep supporting it
codethief 6y ago
I don't think MDN is going to go anywhere anytime soon. I remember someone on Twitter saying that there are enough people from other organizations who had already been involved in the MDN docs before the lay-offs at Mozilla and that these people will likely stay involved. Case in point: Both the MDN Github repos and the MDN docs (or at least all the pages I bothered to look at) show very recent activity: https://github.com/mdn/ https://github.com/mdn/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web (scroll all the way down to "Last modified") https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/A_re-introduction_to_JavaScript https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/A_re...
- offtop5 6y ago
  Still helps to have paid employees working on it. I'm happy to see community involvement, but it's such a vital resource that deserves funding

ibraheemdev 6y ago

Is Mozilla going to continue sponsoring the Rust project for the forseeable future? After letting servo out [1] > Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed. Now it’s time for Servo to leave the nest! Is there any chance they do the same with the Rust language? Either way, Mozilla has done a huge amount of work to improve the systems programming field, and created an incredible language ecosystem in Rust.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
steveklabnik 6y ago
We are still in the process of setting up the Rust Foundation, and so you'll see who's sponsoring at that point.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Hopefully it will be more open with showing where the sponsorship money goes (I hope most of it will go to developers and Rust contributors like you) than other foundations that I don't want to name here.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    The foundation is being set up by the Rust team, to be clear. I think with "more open" you're suggesting that this is like, an offshoot of mofo or something.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      I don't understand your answer completely, but I guess you know that the Mozilla execs are not the most trusted people right now by HN folks, so ,,offshot of mofo'' doesn't sound as good as Rust foundation by Rust core contributors :) Anyways I really hope it will be successful!

manchoz 6y ago

Because AWS doesn't have his own fancy language.

joseluisq 6y ago
Yeah, like those Gos, Javas, Kotlins, C Sharps and so on. A lot of fanciness rolling across companies.
aDotInTheVoid 6y ago
https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1248321281474408450 https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1248321281474408450
- ibraheemdev 6y ago
  CloudFormation is not a language, it is a collection of cloud infrastructure
  - EdSchouten 6y ago
    This tweet is likely referring to the fact that you can place special constructs in the YAML/JSON files to add control flow, thereby making it a crude templating language.
- ibraheemdev 6y ago
  Microsoft has Project Verona
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Microsoft has C#, F# and Visual Basic that are rather more significant than Project Verona.
    - ibraheemdev 6y ago
      True but I was thinking more in the systems programming context

LukeEF 6y ago

Having developed and launched a database (TerminusDB) built on a Rust core, this makes me slightly nervous. Feels like the evil empire will bring both great riches and great peril to the fantastic Rust community (part of the reason we picked Rust). Guaranteed sponsors for conferences, but also a certain malignant cynicism (am I being too harsh?). AWS will also aggressively compete for the best talent, which is tricky when you are small and open source.

fulafel 6y ago
Yep, Rust is especially vulnerable to featureitis because it's already a big language. The more surface area, the more breeding ground for temptations for growing the language. And in its current users a survivorship bias for new feature appetite.
_greim_ 6y ago
> AWS will also aggressively compete for the best talent, which is tricky when you are small and open source. Barring surges in demand at month-scale timelines, this isn't a zero sum game. Competition for Rust talent will result in an increase in the amount of Rust talent. Even better if you're open source; a growing population of Rust devs roaming the planet can only help you.
- LukeEF 6y ago
  that is probably fair, I suppose comparing to the python world the financial folk soak up a lot of talent, but the open source ecosystem is stronger and better than ever.

k__ 6y ago

Good to read that. I really like AWS products and Rust is the first system programming language I'm really interested in.

ufmace 6y ago

If they really want to help, the most obvious first step would seem to be to formally adopt and throw some full-time resources at the Rusoto AWS library set for Rust. It's pretty usable right now, but would certainly benefit from the level of testing, helper methods, and language-specific additions that the officially supported AWS libs have.

mjasay 6y ago
It's a good call out, and one that we're actively engaged with. Matthew has done fantastic work on Rusoto and we'd like to be helpful there. Stay tuned.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  I'd love to see this as well. From a compiler perspective, Rusoto takes a long time to compile. Some of that is just the sheer volume of code, but also, it wouldn't surprise me if it's hitting bottlenecks in the compiler (e.g. a recently fixed issue in the performance of #[derive(...)] on a huge number of structs). Getting appropriate bits of Rusoto put into the compiler's performance testsuite could help, and profiling the compiler on it would likely turn up some areas for improvement. I would also love to see support for using Rusoto on non-Tokio runtimes. Given the amount of code generation used for Rusoto, abstracting over the remainder (such as the choice of async traits) based on a feature flag would hopefully be feasible.
  - kolektiv 6y ago
    And as a secondary thought around Rusoto (which is awesome, but could be even more so) - it would be great if we came up with some way of covering the non-HTTP/REST type services - for example, there are various streaming services (think speech to text, text to speech, etc.) which are simply not covered by Rusoto. So you can configure those services using Rusoto, but not use them. I've written a few medium-hacky clients for things like AWS Transcribe, but it would be great to... well, not have to. Rusoto is an awesome project though, huge thanks to those who've got it to where it is.
- 6y ago

andrewmcwatters 6y ago

Am I just not "with it?" I don't see the appeal of Rust, but it gets the hottest talk in HN-town. Maybe it's just because I haven't worked long enough with C or C++ to complain about them (only about a decade or so), but I don't have any issues with those languages. And I find it wholly unappealing to abandon the existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems all in the name of whatever it is that Rust delivers on. I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and experiment with something I can't take off the shelf and be productive with from day one. I've also mentioned I just can't stand the way the language looks. It's ugly as sin, and I know I'm not alone in that opinion. I made some crude comments in a previous thread here on HN about Servo, but still came away with the feeling there was literally no one using Servo, the site didn't tell you how to actually use it, and no one cared, but the hype was unreal because it was web tech written in Rust. Edit: The points on this post are fluctuating wildly. If you're interested in Rust, could you share your knowledge with some of us who are on the fence like me instead of downvoting? It doesn't actually help me understand anything about the language or community other than I shouldn't criticize Rust because its users will downvote you.

ForHackernews 6y ago
I haven't used it myself, but my understanding as an outsider is that a lot of the excitement around Rust is that it's bringing a new model of memory safety: with the borrow-checker, you can avoid the performance penalties of garbage collection, while also avoiding the bugs and security risks seen in C. People who care about such things are really hyped because it's a truly new idea in a mainstream(ish) language. https://willcrichton.net/notes/rust-memory-safety/ https://willcrichton.net/notes/rust-memory-safety/
wwright 6y ago
> but still came away with the feeling there was literally no one using Servo Code from Servo is in every single copy of Firefox, so it's pretty popular as code goes. > And I find it wholly unappealing to abandon the existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems all in the name of whatever it is that Rust delivers on. I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and play with toys. Rust doesn't throw away that corpus. Rust draws heavily on that corpus. It leverages LLVM (used to compile C/C++), integrates with C libraries, integrates with GDB, draws a ton of design decisions from actual experience using C++, and so on. It's a tool that runs inside Firefox, AWS, Microsoft, and a lot of other high-reliability, high-performance areas. It may be young, but it's quickly building (IMO compelling) evidence that it's very much not a "toy." ;)

bsaul 6y ago

So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ? I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust. This post is obviously from an engineer, but i fear the day business people will start looking into ways to leverage the contribution Amazon made to Rust.

sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
I don't think that's what's going on here. Swift and Go were both projects that Apple and Google respectively dedicated a lot of engineering resources to growing into mainstream popularity. AWS would have to spend a decade stewarding Rust the same way to get the same "halo effect".
masklinn 6y ago
> So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ? No? Project sponsorship, either direct or by hiring prominent contributors, have a long history in OSS support and have little to do with "owning" languages. Did Google or Dropbox take ownership of Python when they hired GvR? > I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust. What are you talking about? It's literally not their decision to make.
- bsaul 6y ago
  Imagine Amazon keep hiring all the main contributors of the language and mainstream libraries, then decide to fork the language to add their own custom flavor, under their own conditions. We're still very far from that point, but i've seen worst things happened in the history of big megacorps.
dagmx 6y ago
I'm not sure that's a reasonable take. Apple and Google both use Rust too. Amazon also uses other languages. The languages you mentioned were developed in house by those companies, rust is independent
roncohen 6y ago
> This post is obviously from an engineer Not really. The post is by Matt Asay who's title is Head of Open Source Strategy and Marketing. The post reads like an attempt at improving upon the negative image AWS has garnered in open source by making money on open source projects without paying, or sometimes without even crediting, the authors. Most recent examples include Headless Recorder[1] and before that Kafka, Elasticsearch etc. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24799660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24799660

013a 6y ago

This is excellent; hopefully we get native Rust support on Lambda soon maybe? :)

steveklabnik 6y ago
In what sense? They released a runtime two years ago: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/rust-runtime-for-aws-lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/rust-runtime-for-aws...
- bjohnso5 6y ago
  I think the parent commenter meant as a selectable runtime at deployment time (i.e. directly supported), rather than requiring the bring-your-own-runtime setup that is currently required.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    I'm not sure how meaningful that would be. Selectable runtimes make a huge amount of sense for interpreted languages or languages with a runtime. Rust is compiled to a binary. There are libraries that make it easy to set up a Lambda runtime, and guides for deploying that runtime; beyond that, a Lambda runtime is "run this program, leave it running, answer requests", and I don't know how standardized that could easily become with a compiled language that doesn't need a runtime or interpreter.

astan 6y ago

Mixed feelings, on one hand, I'm so excited about the investment since I'm a big fan of Rust, on the other, I don't want it to be a clusterfuck like IETF and web standards development where companies like Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla get to dictate what is and isn't allowed on the web. I just hope the Rust community is able to stand up for itself and resist inclusion of unnecessary things against these big players with infinite resources.

masklinn 6y ago
> I don't want it to be a clusterfuck like IETF and web standards development where companies like Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla get to dictate what is and isn't allowed on the web. You may want to note that there's a pretty damn big difference between the two: the rust project needs to be interoperable with itself and that's about the extent of it. The web needs to be interoperable period, so if there isn't some sort of buy-in or the ability to push your weight around, spec-ing or implementing something is just a waste of time. Putting resources into the language doesn't mean you control it, and volunteer-driven projects go where they will. Python or Ruby are not owned by their sponsors.

rossmohax 6y ago

Twitter previously invested in Scala, which significantly contributed to it's adoption outside of relatively small community back then. Another part of success was Spark. It looks like Rust gains bigcorp support, all we need now is a killer product written in it to kick off explosive growth.

ibraheemdev 6y ago
I totally agree. If a large scale product is written primarily in Rust from the start, adoption in production environments and startups will increase dramatically.
sitkack 6y ago
Interviewing for a FAANG job in Rust.

mattgreg 6y ago

Want to work with Rust? Ockam.io loves Rust, and we are hiring! https://www.ockam.io/team#open-roles https://www.ockam.io/team#open-roles

autarch 6y ago
The read more button on https://www.ockam.io/team https://www.ockam.io/team is a 404 (to https://www.ockam.io/learn/guides/team/values_and_virtues_on_the_Ockam_Team https://www.ockam.io/learn/guides/team/values_and_virtues_on...). Also, there's an "Ockam Values" header right below with no content under it. Edit: but not if I go directly to the page. Maybe it was a transient Chrome bug.
- db48x 6y ago
  All I see is blue with a header and footer, probably because my ad blocker blocks google tag manager.

s1k3s 6y ago

> Why AWS loves Rust Because it's cool and they want a spot on that poster?

renewiltord 6y ago

Do we already have a list of companies that will be sponsors of the Rust foundation?

steveklabnik 6y ago
There is no public list.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Cool. Thank you. Eager to find out in time, though I suspect the language will flourish regardless.

_J_Ten_ 6y ago

This is huge for Rust. I always had a love/hate relationship with Rust. Love for the language and runtime characteristics. The lack of stability of the ecosystem combined with the small standard lib and the enthusiats/hobbyist mindset (sorry, but that was my impression) was a show stopper for using it in business apps where Rust could be great but was not strictly necessary.

ThinkBeat 6y ago

Probably an unpopular opinion but I am not very excited by this. Getting funding and support is great, but the needs of the many are very different than the needs of AWS and Facebook. In my opinion we see this a lot in Linux as well. What Google wants has almost nothing to do with what I need. (I said almost). I think it should gestate a while in a less FAANGy environment.

chabad360 6y ago
It should be noted that programming languages are different from software. AWS is paying developers to primarily work on it's needs for Linux (as that is how Linux is generally maintained, you upstream a module, you maintain it). In Rust on the other hand (like most/all languages) new features tend to benefit everybody, AWS simply might be able to prioritize development of certain aspects, but they certainly don't get to make work almost exclusively for them.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Rust's popularity really is an incredible phenomenon. Amazon positioning itself as a big user and supporter of Rust is just good business. They do not want someone to appear more of a friend to Rust than they are.

ronlobo 6y ago

That's great news and will contribute further to Rusts' adoption. Large codebases will be able to transcode to language X at some point in the future and I am waiting for the day when it can be done for Rust with projects like https://github.com/facebookresearch/TransCoder/ https://github.com/facebookresearch/TransCoder/

intricatedetail 6y ago

They should pay contributors few millions of dollars each. If they benefited from it they should give meaningful reward. Mouthful words won't suddenly change you from being simply a leech.

oxymoron 6y ago
They have hired people who will be working specifically on rust. Just the names listed in the article amounts to millions of dollars invested yearly.
- intricatedetail 6y ago
  But that should be millions per developer. Maybe developers should lobby RIAA, so that companies like Amazon would have to pay royalties for every line of code used. You know they make billions of off that work and yet some developers can't afford even their own place to live. This exploitation must end!

blub 6y ago

It feels like it was yesterday when HN was praising Tim Bray for quitting Amazon AWS [1] over the firing of whistleblowers. And on the other hand we have what appear to be several prominent Rust community members falling over each other to get hired by Amazon and the Rust HN community largely cheering Amazon. The Rust community seems quite desperate for corporate money and support. Amazon's not paying you out of love fellas, even if it says so in the blog post's title. [1] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-A...

steveklabnik 6y ago
The real world is a complicated thing. It is very possible to be critical of one part of an organization while working with another. Or even be critical of an organization you’re a part of! Nobody believes they are doing it solely out of love, but luckily, that’s not required for it to be a productive relationship.

secondcoming 6y ago

People talk about Rust like how people talk about alt-coins. It's really odd and emotional.

ashneo76 6y ago

If there is anyone here from the rust community, please please please stay away from amazon. There is nothing stopping amazon and aws. Any thing they do is evil. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196521 If there is an opencollective somewhere, I am not than happy to give you the money directly. I support Mozilla and Wikipedia and other projects to my best effort, and I would love it if others can do that too. All Amazon has ever done is lip service to open source. There is a multibillionaire at the top with no need for that money who every day costs not to do something good for the planet and is instead enabling commoditizing the general populace.