3 ms·

FWIW, I have seen some of this behavior from people who have just discovered Rust, but none from people who are actually established members of the Rust communi

by Yoric 3y ago

FWIW, I have seen some of this behavior from people who have just discovered Rust, but none from people who are actually established members of the Rust community. In my personal experience, the Rust community is very welcoming, extremely open to criticism and discussing tradeoffs – and yes, pretty happy of the language, just as every PL community.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the problem with Rust right now is that it is in the unfortunate position of being an ascendant language for "cool kids". It has captured some portion of the attention of a younger and more trend-focused audience, and people are attaching their egos and careers to it and jostling to make themselves "known" in its community, etc. That and some of the projects and types of work adopting it; last year the "web3" and "crypto" companies began piling in, which had a markedly corrosive effect on the language and its emphasis. In general, the amount of "webscale" type work being done in Rust right now has shifted the focus in published crates, etc. from "systems" type work to a lot of the "async serving" types of stuff. For someone like myself whose interest (and day job) in Rust is in embedded, "systems" (closer to the metal, storage, virtual machine, database internals, etc), and the like, this is a bit discouraging. In general the list of speakers at RustCon (before the whole fiasco) didn't look on the whole like the list of speakers around a "systems programming language" for example (with some exceptions). As more "boring" work is done in Rust, this will hopefully shift. The trend hoppers will move on.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  > In general, the amount of "webscale" type work being done in Rust right now This had nothing to do with web3 and crypto, and everything to do with FAANGs and similar large companies not in those industries.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    I don't see that at all. I can't speak for Meta, but I just came from Google last year... there was zero zero zero work being done in Rust for anything service or web related. The only Rust work at Google that I knew of was Fuchsia stuff. But there's job postings all over the place for either "web3" companies and/or others for tokio/async/web stuff in Rust. Which seems like gratuitous novelty seeking to me, TBH.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      Yeah, in terms of "who is using Rust the most" inside of literal FAANG, least to most: * Netflix isn't using it at all, as far as I know * Google is using it in Fuchsia and Android, but I'm not aware of many web service things. Fucsia does use async/await though. Not sure about Android as I haven't examined it closely. * Apple is using it as the backend of services, and on some storage team, though for the latter I haven't heard from it in a while. They're absolutely async/await users. * Facebook/Meta are using it in a number of ways, for services but also as well as like, the SCM, filesystem, and build system. The latter aren't web services but do use async/await. * Amazon is using it heavily inside of AWS. You don't get more "web services" than that. But also, I meant "FAANG" in a broader sense. Large, established tech companies. Cloudflare, Microsoft, stuff like that. If you check out who is sponsoring the Rust foundation (not that that means that this gets you more weight for new features, mind you) https://foundation.rust-lang.org/members/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/members/ it's very much not dominated by crypto or web3. When I was on the Rust team, we didn't prioritize web3/crypto use cases, and I haven't seen any evidence of that changing. It's always been kinda awkward, frankly. After writing this comment, I also wonder if maybe that's also not some of the disconnect here: while async/await is critical for network services in Rust, it's also useful for other things too. So you have a larger coalition than you may think that's interested in directing the language in that way.

by Yoric 3y ago

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the problem with Rust right now is that it is in the unfortunate position of being an ascendant language for "cool kids". It has captured some portion of the attention of a younger and more trend-focused audience, and people are attaching their egos and careers to it and jostling to make themselves "known" in its community, etc. That and some of the projects and types of work adopting it; last year the "web3" and "crypto" companies began piling in, which had a markedly corrosive effect on the language and its emphasis. In general, the amount of "webscale" type work being done in Rust right now has shifted the focus in published crates, etc. from "systems" type work to a lot of the "async serving" types of stuff. For someone like myself whose interest (and day job) in Rust is in embedded, "systems" (closer to the metal, storage, virtual machine, database internals, etc), and the like, this is a bit discouraging. In general the list of speakers at RustCon (before the whole fiasco) didn't look on the whole like the list of speakers around a "systems programming language" for example (with some exceptions). As more "boring" work is done in Rust, this will hopefully shift. The trend hoppers will move on.

steveklabnik 3y ago
> In general, the amount of "webscale" type work being done in Rust right now This had nothing to do with web3 and crypto, and everything to do with FAANGs and similar large companies not in those industries.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I don't see that at all. I can't speak for Meta, but I just came from Google last year... there was zero zero zero work being done in Rust for anything service or web related. The only Rust work at Google that I knew of was Fuchsia stuff. But there's job postings all over the place for either "web3" companies and/or others for tokio/async/web stuff in Rust. Which seems like gratuitous novelty seeking to me, TBH.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    Yeah, in terms of "who is using Rust the most" inside of literal FAANG, least to most: * Netflix isn't using it at all, as far as I know * Google is using it in Fuchsia and Android, but I'm not aware of many web service things. Fucsia does use async/await though. Not sure about Android as I haven't examined it closely. * Apple is using it as the backend of services, and on some storage team, though for the latter I haven't heard from it in a while. They're absolutely async/await users. * Facebook/Meta are using it in a number of ways, for services but also as well as like, the SCM, filesystem, and build system. The latter aren't web services but do use async/await. * Amazon is using it heavily inside of AWS. You don't get more "web services" than that. But also, I meant "FAANG" in a broader sense. Large, established tech companies. Cloudflare, Microsoft, stuff like that. If you check out who is sponsoring the Rust foundation (not that that means that this gets you more weight for new features, mind you) https://foundation.rust-lang.org/members/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/members/ it's very much not dominated by crypto or web3. When I was on the Rust team, we didn't prioritize web3/crypto use cases, and I haven't seen any evidence of that changing. It's always been kinda awkward, frankly. After writing this comment, I also wonder if maybe that's also not some of the disconnect here: while async/await is critical for network services in Rust, it's also useful for other things too. So you have a larger coalition than you may think that's interested in directing the language in that way.