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Is Rust that important that you have to place "built in Rust" in the title? Is this like a cult following that we only bet on traffic and interest coming from o

• adamnemecek 4y ago
  It is important. Rust projects are infinitely easier to contribute to.
  • dividedbyzero 4y ago
    Compared to what?
    • freilanzer 4y ago
      Python?
    • bsnnkv 4y ago
      For me: compared to projects in languages with less mature tooling and compilers less capable of preventing entire classes of errors by default.
    • adamnemecek 4y ago
      Anything. Legit no language comes even close in terms of how easy it is to git clone something and get it to build.
      • hu3 4y ago
        I'd argue Go projects tend to be easier to build since they require nightly Go builds much less frequently (I don't even remember a project that ever required nightly Go tbh). https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=rust%20nightly&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
        • Keats 4y ago
          Maybe it's better now with Go modules but the last couple of repos I wanted to contribute a few years back just didn't build. They both were relying on the master branch of some other projects that had breaking changes.
        • earthling8118 4y ago
          I've had the absolute opposite luck with go. There's a lot of good things made in it but I prefer to not be involved in them. A nightly toolchail for rust is trivial to acquire to the point of it taking only a few seconds
      • dividedbyzero 4y ago
        But contributing takes a lot more than just a working build environment.
        • adamnemecek 4y ago
          Correct but getting a build environment easily is such a quality of life improvement.
• curquiza 4y ago
  Hello! For me, "built in Rust" can be a real marketing argument. Indeed, Rust is a language that has proved its safety in the past. Building a technical product in Rust guarantees stability and safety (no memory issues in general) and performance (no garbage collector issue), so it brings more trust to the users.
  • rockwotj 4y ago
    FWIW milli does use unsafe in places. Also I would recommend not conflating no GC and performance. There are lots of reasons for Rust being fast and many have nothing to do with no GC. The main reasons a lot of languages with GC are slower is due to allocating on the heap as opposed to the stack, and in general Rust does a lot of static linking and the compiler has the full amount of information to optimize calls without needing to move stuff to the heap. That's the main perf win. Actually there are times when GC is more efficient than than automatically freeing memory because GC can batch cleanup work.
    • Kerollmops 4y ago
      I am the co-founder and maintainer of the engine, and I confirm we have some localized unsafe blocks for when we interface with the C library: LMDB. However, I prefer having a few unsafe blocks that I can review carefully than a single one encapsulating the primary function.
    • UltimateEdge 4y ago
      > Actually there are times when GC is more efficient than than automatically freeing memory because GC can batch cleanup work. Where can I read about these details of software performance? Can you recommend a book?
  • groestl 4y ago
    Safety yes, but stability? It's crash early model wrt stack overflows and out-of-memory errors seems to trade off availability for safety. Not proficient in Rust as a user nor as a developer, so an honest question.
• drcongo 4y ago
  I'm not a Rust dev, but I am the target market for this product and I kinda care that it's written in Rust. That gives me some (possibly entirely wrong) confidence that it's likely to be a single binary, easily installed, fast and relatively safe. More broadly, if there had been two headlines on the front page today and the other said "Open source search engine written in Node / JS" I would make assumptions about the 7 million dependencies and endless security updates in every single one of them that I'd have to monitor. Obviously I would also skip straight past that one. So yes, the technology choice is important.
  • Yoric 4y ago
    For context (and I say that as a Rust developer), please note that Rust has the same strength/weakness as Node in terms of dependencies. There is ongoing work to strengthen this. I do not know the status.
    • drcongo 4y ago
      Thanks. Would I be correct in assuming that there should be less of a burden on me as an end user with Rust though as I only need to update the one binary that I installed?
      • Yoric 4y ago
        How did you install the binary? If you installed it from source, you'll need to `cargo update && cargo build`. If you downloaded a binary or installed it from your distro's repo, generally you just need to update that one binary, yes.
        • drcongo 4y ago
          Thanks for clarifying. Yes, I'd typically install a Rust program from the distro's repos.
      • bogeholm 4y ago
        Usually you would only need to update a single binary, as the dependencies are compiled in. You may get some libc-issues if you try to run a binary built for a newer Linux on an older Linux, unless it is built to target musl - don’t remember the details 100%
• pdimitar 4y ago
  It's important, yes. If it was written in C/C++ I'll fully expect to have my servers pwned due to a memory safety bug that these (and many other) languages don't protect against. There's a number of technical people with decision-making powers that pay attention. And a part of them prioritize Rust-written projects. It's a sound (literally) and safe investment. I don't get the people getting ticked off by the "written in Rust" clarification. Can we finally stop pretending that all programming languages are equal? They absolutely are not.
  • rockwotj 4y ago
    Milli uses unsafe for what it's worth so it's not as safe as you may think. I do assume any post with "written in rust" does better on hacker news.
    • serverholic 4y ago
      A little unsafe is better than all unsafe.
    • pdimitar 4y ago
      Question is: do you realize that Rust's `unsafe` is still not as unsafe as C without bound checks, double `free`-s, and others? Point is, it's still an improvement. I am regularly amazed as to why that factually correct and (more and more) time-proven argument is always skipped when criticizing Rust.
      • rockwotj 4y ago
        I'm not criticizing Rust, I really like Rust and think it's great, along with the trend of more things written in it. At the same time assuming you'll never get a memory issue is over the top.
        • pdimitar 4y ago
          Dunno, I think it should be clear for all experienced devs that the "never" part is still not achieved. Personally though -- and in my work -- I'll take any improvement that I can. I am sick of reading about yet another important piece of software having yet another memory safety zero day pwnage bug.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  For those of us who like editing our source code, it's useful to know. And since this is HN, that's a lot of us.
• paraboul 4y ago
  For some reason "built in Rust" resonate with "unbloated" to me, which can be quite appealing for this kind of software.
• rozgo 4y ago
  Built in Rust tells me a certain bar has been reached. Tells me the team went through a lot of effort to do their best. And the mature tooling makes it easy for me to evaluate and confirm my assumptions. So yes, positive marketing in my case.
• jabo 4y ago
  I’ve come to see it this way: If a set of users are using a product only because it is built in X, that user base is most likely the early adopter audience for X and it dangerously masks whether that product has product-market fit or not. So if a product markets itself as built in X, it is appealing to early adopters of X. The long-tail of users on the other hand, care more about what painful problem the product is solving for them. Now, some of the features of X might provide benefits to end users, but the long tail of users care more about those benefits they get rather than the fact that X provides those benefits, and that the product uses X.
  • xpe 4y ago
    An open source project also has to attract contributors. Rust is a competitive advantage in terms of appeal relative to languages such as C, C++, Java, empirically speaking.
• serverholic 4y ago
  I’ve found that there are a confluence of factors that make “built in rust” important to me. First of all, Rust is relatively new so this tells me that the codebase is likely new. Secondly, I think rust tends to attract smart people who like programs to be small and fast. Case-in-point meilisearch is a simple, single binary download. Both of these together indicate that a project has a higher chance of being freshly written code, by smart people, that is small and fast. Before I get a bunch of we’ll actually’s, I’m not saying these things are true 100% of the time.
• spoiler 4y ago
  As some people mentioned: I generally expect a higher standard of software when I see "build in Rust". That expectation includes a few things such as stability and operational UX (ie how easy it is to run and maintain). And these (in my experience as a Rust developer) stems from the fact that it's much easier to get the MVP and business logic taken care of becau I'm not bogged down by the drudgery of menial tasks that C++ imposes. There's also a much lower "devtime" cost to adding UX in Rust than C++ Of course, this all holds equally true when comparing Rust to a higher level language like TypeScript and its rich ecosystem, but it does come at higher resources utilisation for the same task too (on average, maybe not always, especially after the code gets JITed).
  • wejick 4y ago
    While I can agree on the argument that rust offer many ergonomics and keep us away on many classes of security and memory management related issues. The quality of UX/DX is more defined by product and design requirements, not much to do with language of choice. Similar like restful api, good or bad is on the designer hand most of the time, not because it's implemented on some esoteric language.
    • sodapopcan 4y ago
      OP said "devtime cost", ie, time to implement. They made no mention or insinuation of quality.
    • spoiler 4y ago
      Yeah, but there's usually more time to put an emphasis on UX, as well as the fact that the ergonomics of the language again make it easier to implement the UX.
• timeon 4y ago
  > cult following Seems unnecessary to jump right to cult following. Not "cult" but RSS following is often the case where keyword in title makes the difference. I wonder why does it bothers you if it is not relevant for you. What is your problem? Why can people let others be? > It's not the first time I see Obviously and your comment is not first complaining about that title contains "implemented in X".
• orangepurple 4y ago
  When I see built in Rust I know the software is well built, easy to further extend if it is open source, and probably won't crash or bug out on me.
• Yoric 4y ago
  I believe that there is a good reason. Rust is currently in the process of trying to eat some of C++'s cake (as well as that of Java, C# or Go). The usual response from C++ (Java, etc.) devotees is that Rust hasn't been tried on large projects so it cannot be compared. Which absolutely makes sense. Each large scale project that demonstrates that Rust can be used successfully in a domain where C++ (Java, etc.) traditionally rules is a step forward for the Rust community. Also, as with every language, there is a hype period. We're currently in the Rust honeymoon. My personal honeymoon has stopped a while ago, but Rust remains my favorite language for the foreseeable future.
  • bayesian_horse 4y ago
    People overreact to hype and anti-hype. Rust is already a useful tool and has momentum. But it's not trivial to get into and it won't replace C++ codebases overnight either. Based on historical data, a good lower bound for its future could be Ruby. According to TIOBE, Rust overtook Ruby in popularity, while Ruby has maintained roughly the same popularity for years. At worst, I expect Ruby to stay about as relevant as Ruby on Rails. But it doesn't look that way...
• hota_mazi 4y ago
  "Built in Rust" carries with it a few positive connotations: - It's fast. - It's safe. Or more specifically, memory safe, which implies that it will be harder to compromise than similar products written in a different language. Also, these two points are not hype.
• didip 4y ago
  Why would this not matter? Built in Rust means no annoying GC pause, and that's important for a database. And it also hopefully means less on-heap abuse.
• thiht 4y ago
  An argument that I didn't see mentioned: when I see "search engine", I immediately think of ElasticSearch, which is Java, which requires a JVM. Knowing Meilisearch is written in Rust makes me confident I can probably just run `./meilisearch` and get something working. I can also guess it'll be more resource efficient (CPU, memory) than ElasticSearch. I also *hate* ElasticSearch developer experience, and have had extremely good DX with Rust tools, so I can guess maybe their query language is saner. Maybe all this is wrong, but this is what I'm feeling when I see "written in Rust". So yeah, writing it conveys some meaning.
• avinassh 4y ago
  This info helps me decide to check out a project. I am familiar with Rust, so any project in Rust gets my attention quickly. If the title didn’t mention the language, I would first check the language used! It’s an open-source search engine which one could self-host. Language and tooling matter a lot to me and is often deciding factor.
• potatochup 4y ago
  As someone who primarily writes rust for work, it appeals to me because I feel much more confident I can fix an issue myself if I need to. Same with python (which I'm equally familiar with), although I have much less confidence when modifying python code that I won't break something unrelated.
• wtetzner 4y ago
  This is Hacker News, where people are ostensibly interested in the technology used to build projects.