4 ms·

Why does everything need to be written in rust these days?

ramon156 3y ago
As a rust dev I'm just as perplexed. I've seen preprocessors and stuff like tailwind being rewritten in Rust aswell. Why though (
- mtsr 3y ago
  Some dev workflow tools really benefit from being very fast. And parsing and ast building and the like are actually things that rust is quite good for. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done in other languages, but it’s a weighing of trade-offs. And of course, groups of people, such as developers on socials, are quite sensitive to popularity.
  - vsnf 3y ago
    > And parsing and ast building and the like are actually things that rust is quite good for. Having built a compiler and typechecker in Rust, I don't know if I'd say that it was "quite good" for it. Going back, I'd still do it again, but it wasn't exactly a cakewalk. Rust's lifetime rules and visceral hatred of referential structs did not make my life easy at all. I definitely took the easy way out with a lot of string copies too.
  - dbrgn 3y ago
    Just as an example: Our eslint checks take 2 minutes to complete. Improving this would considerably improve developer productivity.
- fullspectrumdev 3y ago
  If it speeds up a build/CI pipeline it’s a worthwhile investment for a lot of folks
  - RamblingCTO 3y ago
    You can get a big speedbump with go without introducing the overhead of object lifecycle management.
    - xnorswap 3y ago
      Your sentence is confusing; a speedbump is designed to slow you down.
      - RamblingCTO 3y ago
        Haha, you're right. I meant speed bump. As a German I'm used to chaining words together.
        xnorswap 3y ago
        It wasn't the chaining that was an issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_bump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_bump . Perhaps "speed boost" would be a better alternative for your intended meaning.
        jamincan 3y ago
        Interestingly "bump in speed" would be fine, but "speed bump", means the exact opposite.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - jasonjmcghee 3y ago
        It isn’t in this context. “got a speed bump” vs “hit a speed bump”
    - crabmusket 3y ago
      Then rewrite Prettier in Go and I'm sure people will use it :)
- biorach 3y ago
  > I've seen preprocessors and stuff like tailwind being rewritten in Rust aswell. Why though a) speed. On large codebases each preprocessor (and there may be many) can take a long time b) Rust has several features which make it quite suitable for writing pasrers and suchlike
- Tade0 3y ago
  As a (nominally) front-end developer the RIIR movement's energy is similar to how the front-end community approaches things. Overall Rust and its community have many traits that make them very approachable to people not expected to know anything about systems programming, namely: -Package manager with a familiar philosophy behind it (and not the sort of hell you have to deal with setting up a C++ development environment). -Outputs WASM without much bureaucracy and advertises it. -Friendly compiler messages. I don't recall seeing "perhaps" in a compiler error message before. The people designing Rust put much effort into making the language as approachable as possible and that's the net effect. That is not to say this is going to be necessarily successful, but so far the enthusiasm is there.
civilitty 3y ago
Crab people [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_People
eyeris 3y ago
The swc project reimplemented some of the js build toolchain in rust which led to some great speed ups. I’d imagine that this call for rewriting prettier is inspired by swc Not sure if updating prettier will benefit as much as transpilation. [0] https://swc.rs/docs/benchmarks https://swc.rs/docs/benchmarks
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Any AOT compiled language will do, but only Rust will give extra hacker credo points.
rafaelmn 3y ago
TBH this sounds like a great candidate for rewrite - likely millions of hours of runtime/hour. Prettier is written on a platform with a history of such rewrites getting 10x perf increases. The only alternative that comes to mind is Go but I'm not that offended by Rust choice - has pros and cons.
- tubthumper8 3y ago
  It's not just speed, but also correctness. A quick search in the Prettier repo shows plenty of issues for "undefined is not a function", "cannot read property X of undefined/null", and other such errors that are avoidable in a language with a good type system.
  - adiabatty 3y ago
    Makes me wonder if Prettier would be noticeably improved it it were migrated to TypeScript (first).
    - tubthumper8 3y ago
      IIRC the maintainers are not currently open to migrating to TypeScript
- citrin_ru 3y ago
  It’s a great candidate for a rewrite buy why not Go, Zig, Ocaml, Haskell e. t. c.?
  - zaxomi 3y ago
    No matter what language they choose, someone will complain and ask "why X, why not Y or Z?"
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
      Right which is part of why dictating the implementation language up front as part of the bounty is a mistake. They should have put the bounty on the speedup factor they're looking for and let it sort itself out. My not-completely-naive guess is an expert optimizer can get the improvement they're looking for with only small parts or maybe even none of it rewritten in another language.
darthrupert 3y ago
Because everything is written in nodejs.
johnisgood 3y ago
It is a sad moment for me, because I have more difficulties understanding Rust than Haskell, and believe me, Haskell is very difficult already. I know C, Lua, OCaml, Go, and the like, but Rust? Not really. What I hate the most is reference implementations being in Rust instead of C. C is almost like a pseudo-code.
yoav 3y ago
Can you pls rewrite your comment in rust.

As a rust dev I'm just as perplexed. I've seen preprocessors and stuff like tailwind being rewritten in Rust aswell. Why though (

mtsr 3y ago
Some dev workflow tools really benefit from being very fast. And parsing and ast building and the like are actually things that rust is quite good for. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done in other languages, but it’s a weighing of trade-offs. And of course, groups of people, such as developers on socials, are quite sensitive to popularity.
- vsnf 3y ago
  > And parsing and ast building and the like are actually things that rust is quite good for. Having built a compiler and typechecker in Rust, I don't know if I'd say that it was "quite good" for it. Going back, I'd still do it again, but it wasn't exactly a cakewalk. Rust's lifetime rules and visceral hatred of referential structs did not make my life easy at all. I definitely took the easy way out with a lot of string copies too.
- dbrgn 3y ago
  Just as an example: Our eslint checks take 2 minutes to complete. Improving this would considerably improve developer productivity.
fullspectrumdev 3y ago
If it speeds up a build/CI pipeline it’s a worthwhile investment for a lot of folks
- RamblingCTO 3y ago
  You can get a big speedbump with go without introducing the overhead of object lifecycle management.
  - xnorswap 3y ago
    Your sentence is confusing; a speedbump is designed to slow you down.
    - RamblingCTO 3y ago
      Haha, you're right. I meant speed bump. As a German I'm used to chaining words together.
      - xnorswap 3y ago
        It wasn't the chaining that was an issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_bump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_bump . Perhaps "speed boost" would be a better alternative for your intended meaning.
        jamincan 3y ago
        Interestingly "bump in speed" would be fine, but "speed bump", means the exact opposite.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - jasonjmcghee 3y ago
      It isn’t in this context. “got a speed bump” vs “hit a speed bump”
  - crabmusket 3y ago
    Then rewrite Prettier in Go and I'm sure people will use it :)
biorach 3y ago
> I've seen preprocessors and stuff like tailwind being rewritten in Rust aswell. Why though a) speed. On large codebases each preprocessor (and there may be many) can take a long time b) Rust has several features which make it quite suitable for writing pasrers and suchlike
Tade0 3y ago
As a (nominally) front-end developer the RIIR movement's energy is similar to how the front-end community approaches things. Overall Rust and its community have many traits that make them very approachable to people not expected to know anything about systems programming, namely: -Package manager with a familiar philosophy behind it (and not the sort of hell you have to deal with setting up a C++ development environment). -Outputs WASM without much bureaucracy and advertises it. -Friendly compiler messages. I don't recall seeing "perhaps" in a compiler error message before. The people designing Rust put much effort into making the language as approachable as possible and that's the net effect. That is not to say this is going to be necessarily successful, but so far the enthusiasm is there.

civilitty 3y ago

Crab people [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_People

eyeris 3y ago

The swc project reimplemented some of the js build toolchain in rust which led to some great speed ups. I’d imagine that this call for rewriting prettier is inspired by swc Not sure if updating prettier will benefit as much as transpilation. [0] https://swc.rs/docs/benchmarks https://swc.rs/docs/benchmarks

pjmlp 3y ago
Any AOT compiled language will do, but only Rust will give extra hacker credo points.

rafaelmn 3y ago

TBH this sounds like a great candidate for rewrite - likely millions of hours of runtime/hour. Prettier is written on a platform with a history of such rewrites getting 10x perf increases. The only alternative that comes to mind is Go but I'm not that offended by Rust choice - has pros and cons.

tubthumper8 3y ago
It's not just speed, but also correctness. A quick search in the Prettier repo shows plenty of issues for "undefined is not a function", "cannot read property X of undefined/null", and other such errors that are avoidable in a language with a good type system.
- adiabatty 3y ago
  Makes me wonder if Prettier would be noticeably improved it it were migrated to TypeScript (first).
  - tubthumper8 3y ago
    IIRC the maintainers are not currently open to migrating to TypeScript
citrin_ru 3y ago
It’s a great candidate for a rewrite buy why not Go, Zig, Ocaml, Haskell e. t. c.?
- zaxomi 3y ago
  No matter what language they choose, someone will complain and ask "why X, why not Y or Z?"
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    Right which is part of why dictating the implementation language up front as part of the bounty is a mistake. They should have put the bounty on the speedup factor they're looking for and let it sort itself out. My not-completely-naive guess is an expert optimizer can get the improvement they're looking for with only small parts or maybe even none of it rewritten in another language.

darthrupert 3y ago

Because everything is written in nodejs.

johnisgood 3y ago

It is a sad moment for me, because I have more difficulties understanding Rust than Haskell, and believe me, Haskell is very difficult already. I know C, Lua, OCaml, Go, and the like, but Rust? Not really. What I hate the most is reference implementations being in Rust instead of C. C is almost like a pseudo-code.

yoav 3y ago

Can you pls rewrite your comment in rust.