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Wow, I can’t believe I’m seeing you in these comments! I was so inspired when I first saw Recut, and I’ve been using your interview questions for inspiration in

Wow, I can’t believe I’m seeing you in these comments! I was so inspired when I first saw Recut, and I’ve been using your interview questions for inspiration in my own interviews recently. My plan as soon as I get my next day job has been to sit down and start making products with the hope of launching on product hunt and the like to start earning money on the side. This post was mainly shopping for input on long-term conceptual growth, so it’s really nice to get this bonus anecdote on Rust in production from you. I definitely would wait to fully invest my time in it until I have my next job given this + the other replies. I am curious if you did any research on Go or other languages for Recut and why you ended up choosing Rust. Would you make the same decision again? Was it worth the time it took to learn Rust for both product/personal purposes, or would you go with something easier if you had to do it again? Recut was especially interesting to me since I’ve had a real time video chat based app on my mind for almost 2 years now and have known js just won’t cut it. Seems like quite the indicator that I should invest in Rust. Thanks for your reply. Means a lot getting feedback from you down here in the HN trenches!

dceddia 4y ago
Awesome, glad to hear that :) So, for Rust vs Go, honestly I had kinda wanted to learn Rust for a while and have only read a little bit of Go, and – this is going to sound incredibly silly, but I'm not a big fan of some of the syntax and conventions from Go. For Recut, the choice was more between (a) coupling Rust with a web-based cross-platform framework like Electron or Tauri or (b) using C++ and Qt. I guess option (c) would be to write and maintain two versions of the app, one in Swift and the other in something Windows-specific, but as a solo developer I ruled that out pretty quickly. So - Rust vs. C++ - and would the Rust + JS be fast enough? I did some experiments to test out some of the things I was worried about, like rendering video frames, and sending data between the UI and Rust. I've had experience with C++ and Qt in the past, so that was a decent option. But I didn't love the idea of getting back into C++ and fighting with the inevitable hard-to-find crashes and race conditions and stuff. And, from building v1 of Recut in Swift, I came to really enjoy some of Swift's safety, too - like guard clauses that rule out null-pointer-related crashes. Rust seemed similar in those aspects. Given how it turned out, I would definitely choose Rust again. I think it might've been wise to try to learn more about the language and tackle some smaller toy problems first, instead of trying to learn it while writing the app. I didn't do much exploratory hacking, and ended up rewriting whole swaths of the video pipeline stuff multiple times. Like at least 5 times. But maybe that was the best way to actually learn it, too. I don't really know if I would've picked up the intuition for some of the patterns if I hadn't had to fight my way through it. So maybe there's some survivorship bias here haha.

dceddia 4y ago

Awesome, glad to hear that :) So, for Rust vs Go, honestly I had kinda wanted to learn Rust for a while and have only read a little bit of Go, and – this is going to sound incredibly silly, but I'm not a big fan of some of the syntax and conventions from Go. For Recut, the choice was more between (a) coupling Rust with a web-based cross-platform framework like Electron or Tauri or (b) using C++ and Qt. I guess option (c) would be to write and maintain two versions of the app, one in Swift and the other in something Windows-specific, but as a solo developer I ruled that out pretty quickly. So - Rust vs. C++ - and would the Rust + JS be fast enough? I did some experiments to test out some of the things I was worried about, like rendering video frames, and sending data between the UI and Rust. I've had experience with C++ and Qt in the past, so that was a decent option. But I didn't love the idea of getting back into C++ and fighting with the inevitable hard-to-find crashes and race conditions and stuff. And, from building v1 of Recut in Swift, I came to really enjoy some of Swift's safety, too - like guard clauses that rule out null-pointer-related crashes. Rust seemed similar in those aspects. Given how it turned out, I would definitely choose Rust again. I think it might've been wise to try to learn more about the language and tackle some smaller toy problems first, instead of trying to learn it while writing the app. I didn't do much exploratory hacking, and ended up rewriting whole swaths of the video pipeline stuff multiple times. Like at least 5 times. But maybe that was the best way to actually learn it, too. I don't really know if I would've picked up the intuition for some of the patterns if I hadn't had to fight my way through it. So maybe there's some survivorship bias here haha.