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There's a reason why we see so many articles like "we rewrote x in rust." Rust makes sense when you've scaled to the point that you're seriously considering per
by 63 4y ago
There's a reason why we see so many articles like "we rewrote x in rust." Rust makes sense when you've scaled to the point that you're seriously considering performance. Sure, starting with rust can potentially save you time, money, and refactoring down the line but only after you've reached a point that few startups ever hit. Otherwise you're limiting yourself with slow development times (compared to, say, Python) and difficulty hiring for very little benefit. I'm sure this startup's founders love rust (and so do I), but ultimately you need to prioritize the company first and that probably means using the most popular, boring tech stack imaginable in the beginning. The more you deviate from that, the harder the early days will be. It's far too easy to be swayed by exciting tech and forget that all that really matters is that you solve someone's problem.
- synergy20 4y agoas far as performance is concerned, many other compiled language will do with easier coding, rust does not really stand out there.
- josephcsible 4y ago> many other compiled language will do with easier coding At the expense of safety.
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoThe thing with Rust is that you are enforcing so many things from the start. I feel that it is actually harder to write bad code in Rust than it is in say, Python.
- pornel 4y agoTrying too hard to write good code can be a deadly mistake for an early-stage startup regardless of the language you use. If you're really a startup, looking for a product-market fit, then you don't know exactly what you're building yet. There's a high change you're going to throw away a lot of code. e.g. you spend effort caring about scalability, flexibility, proper architecture, full test coverage — only to hand it to users who will say they won't buy it, it's not actually the feature they wanted. You can learn such lessons with crappy copy-pasted code, and then worry about code quality once you've figured out what to actually build.
- tikhonj 4y agoSure, but good code saves time even on really short timeframes. Every time I've worked on—or seen other people work on—a "we must hurry at all costs project", enough time is wasted on debugging, firefighting and friction that just building a decently clean system from the get-go would have been faster. I've seen this unambiguously on "throw away" data science code meant to produce a single report (or normal science code meant for a single paper), and that's a much shorter-term effort than anything at a startup. The tradeoff is even clearer once you start working in weeks and months, much less quarters or years.
- shadowgovt 4y agoIt all comes down to whether the team is faster at writing safe code in a tight language or debugging a loose language. My experience has been even with the lossage due to initial errors, teams I'm on have been better debugging errors, especially when the task is so small that the errors are obvious.
- pjmlp 4y agoYou can enforce the same with plenty of strong typed languages with automatic memory management, no need to go Rust for that.