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Honestly it does not really trade development speed IMO. The constraints it imposes pay dividends. Do you write code once and forget it? Or do you often change

by rapsey 3y ago

Honestly it does not really trade development speed IMO. The constraints it imposes pay dividends. Do you write code once and forget it? Or do you often change what your code is doing or how it is structured? Because those changes tend to bring out the most bugs. The type system will really help you with any refactorings. I've done some huge changes to the entire structure of my apps and once it compiles had zero issues. It just worked from first run. Do you find performance problems in production? How much time is spent on those? If you're in Python/Ruby/Erlang land that can be a huge chunk of your time. A Rust solution is going to be memory and cpu efficient by default. Unless you are really in extreme performance land you are likely not going to need to bother with this at all. How about problems with deployment or dependency management. The output of rust is an executable more or less self contained. The package management is superb.

dlisboa 3y ago
There should be a lot more focus on "total cost of ownership" of Ruby/Python/JavaScript. Yes, it is faster to develop initially, but after N years and an established product that development speed gets outweighed by other requirements: how easy is it to refactor confidently? How much does it cost to run? How complicated is the deployment? Does it scale? Not to mention many of the reasons why it's faster to write is because you're punting on handling important issues: can I pass this to that function? Is this a valid state for this variable? Is this data validated? A language like Rust might bog you down at first because it'll require you to do all of that before you get off the ground. But I'd be willing to bet that, if you factor in the whole cost for N years, it'll eventually turn out cheaper. And if you have experience in it it might not even really slow you down. Many would say "yeah but you have to survive N years", and maybe I've just been lucky but most of the products I've worked on have been profitable and successful. In all of them we reached the point where it just wasn't as fast to develop anymore, and now the application was very expensive to run, slow to change and filled with nagging bugs.

by rapsey 3y ago

dlisboa 3y ago

There should be a lot more focus on "total cost of ownership" of Ruby/Python/JavaScript. Yes, it is faster to develop initially, but after N years and an established product that development speed gets outweighed by other requirements: how easy is it to refactor confidently? How much does it cost to run? How complicated is the deployment? Does it scale? Not to mention many of the reasons why it's faster to write is because you're punting on handling important issues: can I pass this to that function? Is this a valid state for this variable? Is this data validated? A language like Rust might bog you down at first because it'll require you to do all of that before you get off the ground. But I'd be willing to bet that, if you factor in the whole cost for N years, it'll eventually turn out cheaper. And if you have experience in it it might not even really slow you down. Many would say "yeah but you have to survive N years", and maybe I've just been lucky but most of the products I've worked on have been profitable and successful. In all of them we reached the point where it just wasn't as fast to develop anymore, and now the application was very expensive to run, slow to change and filled with nagging bugs.