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I sometimes wonder if the problem with rust is that we have not yet had a major set of projects which drive solutions to common dev problems. Go had google dri

by lumost 3y ago

I sometimes wonder if the problem with rust is that we have not yet had a major set of projects which drive solutions to common dev problems. Go had google driving adoption, which in turn drove open source efforts. The language had to remain grounded to not interfere with the doing of building back-end services. Rust had mozilla/servo which was ultimately unsuccessful. While there are more than a few companies uinf rust for small projects with tough performance guarantees - I haven't seen the “we manage 1-10 MM sloc of complex code using rust” type projects.

doublepg23 3y ago
? I believe the Rust efforts in Firefox were largely successful. I think Servo was for experimental purposes and large parts were then added to Firefox with Quantum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Quantum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Quantum
- danielheath 3y ago
  My recollection was that those were separate changes - servo didn’t get to the stage where it could be merged, but it was absolutely the plan to build a rendering engine that outperformed every other browser before budget cuts hit.
  - germandiago 3y ago
    It would be interesting to hace a postmortem of what went well, wrong, etc. for this initial effort. I believe work continues now somewhere else but it would be absolutely nice to know more from the experience from others.
  - kvark 3y ago
    We did port Servo’s WebRender to Firefox and shipped it everywhere. The only caveat is that it took multiple years of upgrades, fixes, and rewriting it.
zozbot234 3y ago
Servo is an ongoing project, it has not "failed" or been unsuccessful in any sense.
- bjconlan 3y ago
  I think the original poster is perhaps speaking to previous articles (ie https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39269949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39269949) which from the outside looking in made me feel that perhaps this infact was the case (at least for a period).
emmelaich 3y ago
> Go had google driving adoption This is commonly said but I think it's only correct in the sense that Google is famous and Google engineers started it. Google never drove adoption; it happened organically.
germandiago 3y ago
I really think the problem of Rust is the borrow checker. Seriously. It is good but it is overkill. You have to do and plan all things around it and discourages a lot of patterns or makes them really difficult to refactor. I would encourage people to understand Hylo's object model and mutable value semantics. I thinks something like that is far better, more ergonomic and very well-performing (in theory at least).
- pigpang 3y ago
  You can use unsafe code and pointers if you really want, but code will be unsafe, like C or C++.
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    TBF, unsafe Rust still enforces much more correctness than C or C++ (Rust's "unsafety" is more similar to Zig than C or C++).
    - zozbot234 3y ago
      TBF this is not really true. Unsafe Rust is a lot harder than comparable C/C++, because it must manually uphold all safety invariants of Safe Rust whenever it interacts with idiomatic Rust code. (These safety invariants are also why Safe Rust can often be compiled into better-optimized code than the idiomatic C/C++ equivalent.)
      - germandiago 3y ago
        I wonder if Rust is killing flies with canons (as we say in spanish). There are perfectly safe alternatives or very safe ones. Even in a project coded in Modern C++ with async code included, activating all warnings (it is a cards game) I found two segfaults in like almost 5 years... It can happen, but it is very rare at least with my coding patterns. The code is in the tens of thousands of lines of code I would say, not sure 100%, will measure it. Is it that bad to put one share pointer here and there and stick to unique pointers and try to not escape references? This is ehat I do and I use spans and string views carefully (you must with those!). I stick to the rule of zero. With all that it is not that difficult to have mostly safe code in my experience. I just use safe subsets except in a handful of places. I am not saying C++ is better than Rust. Rust is still safer. What I am saying is that an evolution of the C++ model is much more ergonomic and less viral than this ton of annotations with a steep learning curve where you spend a good deal of your time fighting the borrow checker. So my question is: - when it stops being worth to fight the borrow checker and just replace it with some alternative, even smart pointers here and there? Bc it seems to have a big viral cost and refactoring cost besides preventing valid patterns.
devjab 3y ago
Microsoft is rewriting quite a bit of their C# to Rust for performance reasons. Especially within their business line products. Rust have also become rather massive in the underlying tech in the telecommunications infra structure in several countries. So I’m not sure that your take is really so on point. Especially as far as comparing it with Go goes (heehee), at least not in terms of 3rd party libraries where most of the Go ecosystems seems to be either maintained by one or two people or abandoned as those two people got new jobs. I think Go is cool by the way, but there is a massive difference in the maturity of the sort of libraries we looked into using during our PoCs. Anyway. A lot of Rust adoption is a little quiet, and well, rather boring. So maybe that’s why you don’t hear too much about it.
- neonsunset 3y ago
  Microsoft rewrote one, maybe two microservices as it was driven by a lead interested in using Rust and is rewriting parts of NT kernel (way more important).
  - devjab 3y ago
    It’s much more than that, even now they are continuously opening job postings with a focus on re-writing the 365 platform from C# to Rust.
    - neonsunset 3y ago
      It’s a bad habit to read too much into a single job posting. (oh, I remember now, it’s the account traumatized by odata)
      - devjab 3y ago
        I’m not sure why you’re trying to make it seem like Microsoft isn’t rewriting the core of their 365 business products from C# to Rust, but you do you I guess. As far as I’m aware I was never traumatised by OData. It’s true that I may have ranted about the sorry state of the public packages available outside of C# or Java. Not unwarranted criticism I think, but I wrote our own internal adaptation which now powers basically all our API clients for Typescript as a single shared no-dependency library. But you seem to think you know me? Have we met?
pcwalton 3y ago
> Rust had mozilla/servo which was ultimately unsuccessful. There's lots of Rust code in Firefox! > I haven't seen the “we manage 1-10 MM sloc of complex code using rust” type projects. Meta has a lot of Rust internally. The problems with Rust for high-level indie game dev logic, where you're doing fast prototyping, are very specific to that domain, and say very little about its applicability in other areas.

by lumost 3y ago

doublepg23 3y ago

? I believe the Rust efforts in Firefox were largely successful. I think Servo was for experimental purposes and large parts were then added to Firefox with Quantum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Quantum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Quantum

danielheath 3y ago
My recollection was that those were separate changes - servo didn’t get to the stage where it could be merged, but it was absolutely the plan to build a rendering engine that outperformed every other browser before budget cuts hit.
- germandiago 3y ago
  It would be interesting to hace a postmortem of what went well, wrong, etc. for this initial effort. I believe work continues now somewhere else but it would be absolutely nice to know more from the experience from others.
- kvark 3y ago
  We did port Servo’s WebRender to Firefox and shipped it everywhere. The only caveat is that it took multiple years of upgrades, fixes, and rewriting it.

zozbot234 3y ago

Servo is an ongoing project, it has not "failed" or been unsuccessful in any sense.

bjconlan 3y ago
I think the original poster is perhaps speaking to previous articles (ie https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39269949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39269949) which from the outside looking in made me feel that perhaps this infact was the case (at least for a period).

emmelaich 3y ago

> Go had google driving adoption This is commonly said but I think it's only correct in the sense that Google is famous and Google engineers started it. Google never drove adoption; it happened organically.

germandiago 3y ago

I really think the problem of Rust is the borrow checker. Seriously. It is good but it is overkill. You have to do and plan all things around it and discourages a lot of patterns or makes them really difficult to refactor. I would encourage people to understand Hylo's object model and mutable value semantics. I thinks something like that is far better, more ergonomic and very well-performing (in theory at least).

pigpang 3y ago
You can use unsafe code and pointers if you really want, but code will be unsafe, like C or C++.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  TBF, unsafe Rust still enforces much more correctness than C or C++ (Rust's "unsafety" is more similar to Zig than C or C++).
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    TBF this is not really true. Unsafe Rust is a lot harder than comparable C/C++, because it must manually uphold all safety invariants of Safe Rust whenever it interacts with idiomatic Rust code. (These safety invariants are also why Safe Rust can often be compiled into better-optimized code than the idiomatic C/C++ equivalent.)
    - germandiago 3y ago
      I wonder if Rust is killing flies with canons (as we say in spanish). There are perfectly safe alternatives or very safe ones. Even in a project coded in Modern C++ with async code included, activating all warnings (it is a cards game) I found two segfaults in like almost 5 years... It can happen, but it is very rare at least with my coding patterns. The code is in the tens of thousands of lines of code I would say, not sure 100%, will measure it. Is it that bad to put one share pointer here and there and stick to unique pointers and try to not escape references? This is ehat I do and I use spans and string views carefully (you must with those!). I stick to the rule of zero. With all that it is not that difficult to have mostly safe code in my experience. I just use safe subsets except in a handful of places. I am not saying C++ is better than Rust. Rust is still safer. What I am saying is that an evolution of the C++ model is much more ergonomic and less viral than this ton of annotations with a steep learning curve where you spend a good deal of your time fighting the borrow checker. So my question is: - when it stops being worth to fight the borrow checker and just replace it with some alternative, even smart pointers here and there? Bc it seems to have a big viral cost and refactoring cost besides preventing valid patterns.

devjab 3y ago

Microsoft is rewriting quite a bit of their C# to Rust for performance reasons. Especially within their business line products. Rust have also become rather massive in the underlying tech in the telecommunications infra structure in several countries. So I’m not sure that your take is really so on point. Especially as far as comparing it with Go goes (heehee), at least not in terms of 3rd party libraries where most of the Go ecosystems seems to be either maintained by one or two people or abandoned as those two people got new jobs. I think Go is cool by the way, but there is a massive difference in the maturity of the sort of libraries we looked into using during our PoCs. Anyway. A lot of Rust adoption is a little quiet, and well, rather boring. So maybe that’s why you don’t hear too much about it.

neonsunset 3y ago
Microsoft rewrote one, maybe two microservices as it was driven by a lead interested in using Rust and is rewriting parts of NT kernel (way more important).
- devjab 3y ago
  It’s much more than that, even now they are continuously opening job postings with a focus on re-writing the 365 platform from C# to Rust.
  - neonsunset 3y ago
    It’s a bad habit to read too much into a single job posting. (oh, I remember now, it’s the account traumatized by odata)
    - devjab 3y ago
      I’m not sure why you’re trying to make it seem like Microsoft isn’t rewriting the core of their 365 business products from C# to Rust, but you do you I guess. As far as I’m aware I was never traumatised by OData. It’s true that I may have ranted about the sorry state of the public packages available outside of C# or Java. Not unwarranted criticism I think, but I wrote our own internal adaptation which now powers basically all our API clients for Typescript as a single shared no-dependency library. But you seem to think you know me? Have we met?

pcwalton 3y ago

> Rust had mozilla/servo which was ultimately unsuccessful. There's lots of Rust code in Firefox! > I haven't seen the “we manage 1-10 MM sloc of complex code using rust” type projects. Meta has a lot of Rust internally. The problems with Rust for high-level indie game dev logic, where you're doing fast prototyping, are very specific to that domain, and say very little about its applicability in other areas.