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I wish the following three paragraphs were widely read and understood by all software developers, especially web developers: > The common wisdom is to maximize

by xpe 2y ago

I wish the following three paragraphs were widely read and understood by all software developers, especially web developers: > The common wisdom is to maximize productivity when performance is less critical. I agree with this position. When building a web application, performance is a secondary concern to productivity. So why are teams adopting Rust more often where performance is less critical? It is because once you learn Rust, you can be very productive. > Productivity is complex and multifaceted. We can all agree that Rust's edit-compile-test cycle could be quicker. This friction is countered by fewer bugs, production issues, and a robust long-term maintenance story (Rust's borrow checker tends to incentivize more maintainable code). Additionally, because Rust can work well for many use cases, whether infrastructure-level server cases, higher-level web applications, or even in the client (browser via WASM and iOS, MacOS, Windows, etc. natively), Rust has an excellent code-reuse story. Internal libraries can be written once and reused in all of these contexts. > So, while Rust might not be the most productive programming language for prototyping, it is very competitive for projects that will be around for years.

rfoo 2y ago
I'd add that a lot of the described advantages come from culture. For web applications manual memory management is 100% a friction instead of a relief. But the culture in Rust community in general, at least for the past ten years or so, is to encourage a coding style with inherently fewer bugs and more reusable, maintainable code, to the point of consistently want something to not happen if they weren't sure they got it right (one may argue that this is counter-production short-term). It is this culture thing makes adopting Rust for web apps worthwhile - it counters the drawback of manual memory management. If you hire an engineer already familiar with Rust you are sure you get someone who is sane. If you onboard someone with no Rust background you can be pretty sure that they are going to learn the right way (tm) to do everything, or fail to make any meaningful contribution, instead of becoming a -10x engineer. If you work in a place with a healthy engineering culture, trains people well, with good infra, it doesn't really matter, you may as well use C++. But for us not so lucky, Rust helps a lot, and it is not about memory safety, at all.
- xpe 2y ago
  I haven’t worked at a place that checks the above boxes for making C++ a great choice for bulletproof code. There seems to be large variation in C++ styles and quality across projects. But it seems to me that for orgs that indeed do C++ well, thanks to the supporting aspects above, moving to Rust might make things even smoother.

by xpe 2y ago

rfoo 2y ago

I'd add that a lot of the described advantages come from culture. For web applications manual memory management is 100% a friction instead of a relief. But the culture in Rust community in general, at least for the past ten years or so, is to encourage a coding style with inherently fewer bugs and more reusable, maintainable code, to the point of consistently want something to not happen if they weren't sure they got it right (one may argue that this is counter-production short-term). It is this culture thing makes adopting Rust for web apps worthwhile - it counters the drawback of manual memory management. If you hire an engineer already familiar with Rust you are sure you get someone who is sane. If you onboard someone with no Rust background you can be pretty sure that they are going to learn the right way (tm) to do everything, or fail to make any meaningful contribution, instead of becoming a -10x engineer. If you work in a place with a healthy engineering culture, trains people well, with good infra, it doesn't really matter, you may as well use C++. But for us not so lucky, Rust helps a lot, and it is not about memory safety, at all.

xpe 2y ago
I haven’t worked at a place that checks the above boxes for making C++ a great choice for bulletproof code. There seems to be large variation in C++ styles and quality across projects. But it seems to me that for orgs that indeed do C++ well, thanks to the supporting aspects above, moving to Rust might make things even smoother.