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I'd like to hear more about the Rust rewrites you've coordinated. Why do you think Rust took longer to change than Python? I've felt this a little bit, but can

I'd like to hear more about the Rust rewrites you've coordinated. Why do you think Rust took longer to change than Python? I've felt this a little bit, but can only theorize why; the borrow checker makes mutability into a viral leaky abstraction, such that a change over here can sometimes cause widespread refactors on other components that would be decoupled in other languages. Jury's still out on whether that's healthy long-term for a codebase, especially once the original writers have left. Jury's also still out on whether it encourages us into better architectures to begin with. Maybe it evens out, maybe not!

melissalobos 5y ago
> Why do you think Rust took longer to change than Python? Potentially the issues we ran into were due to the inexperience of the team, Rust despite being ~12 years old, most of the programmers we were working with had less than 2 years of experience with it. So if you have a more experienced team, your mileage may vary. Given that, I think it has to do with the typing system, it is a lot faster to change your structs in python and propagate the changes as needed than in Rust. Asking for another field to be displayed on a web dashboard could take ~1 hour for a team we had working in Django, and ~2 days for a team working in Rust. Of course the projects in question were wildly different and a lot of other caveats, but still in general we found that Python was just much much faster to make changes with. I was not directly involved in any of the programming, but did review the changes, so my perspective may not be the correct one.