3 ms·

Why Rust instead of cgo?

• buro9 3y ago
  Lots of reasons that on their own were not enough to decide but together made it compelling. We weren't going to use C (Cloudbleed), cgo didn't give us as much control over the FFI as we wanted and produced slightly harder to read output (maintainability for me, is everything — always write code that the drunk at 2am future version of yourself can understand when you're paged), we didn't necessarily want another garbage collected process despite being good at this (Cloudflare's DNS server is written in Go), we wanted memory safety and wanted to keep things small (Go or Rust stand out), we wanted compile time safety over runtime errors, we believed that Rust macros would help make the filter code more readable / maintainable than rolling our own parser in Go or using YACC (see earlier point about your future self maintaining this at an unGodly hour)... it's not like anything was a determining factor, but the reasons accrued until it felt overwhelming. We certainly were not looking to add another language at the time as being first to do so incurs pushback from the org, adding into all of the build and release chains, and the typical higher bar for proving you know what you're doing. Once done everyone can benefit from having the option of another language and being able to select the right tool for the job, but going first incurs a legitimate cost.