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Why should a developer use this for anything beyond a pet project? Just because it is written in Rust? All these "rewritten in rust" projects only reinforce th
by ottavio 3mo ago
Why should a developer use this for anything beyond a pet project? Just because it is written in Rust?
All these "rewritten in rust" projects only reinforce the idea that a significant part of the rust community consists of software talibans and not of engineers who must deliver something that works and is reliable over time.
- alex_duf 3mo agoI think this shouldn't be taken too seriously, from what I understand it's an exploration of what's possible with today's LLMs. You're right to talk about the trend though, because what it shows is how the cost of re-writing well covered project has completely crashed, so that in itself is a learning.
- oblio 3mo agoThe cost of surface level rewrites has crashed. Which will probably cover 80% of cases. Caveat emptor on which side your project falls.
- ottavio 3mo agoI have no issues recognizing that I had memory-related problems in production (I program embedded systems in C). But most of my issues were related to concurrency and data sanification, especially when the other end of communication fails with unexpected behavior. These bugs are nastier than memory. So, I have pointers, and I am not afraid to use them.
- dixtel 3mo ago> software talibans I will note that, very funny
- ottavio 3mo agoWell, this approach is more similar to imposing a dogma thank engineering. Is managing memory safely important? YES Is managing memory safely the solution to most of the problems? Absolutely not. Advocating the language ignoring everything else (having as first and only argument that the code was rewritten in rust fully qualify for this case) is dogma and not engineering.
- m00dy 3mo agowhat does it mean ?
- cryo32 3mo agoYeah I'm using that one. We have a problem with software religious fundamentalists in our organisation and it's an apt description.
- bdelmas 3mo agoI actually had a lot of problems with software cult followers of influencer gurus like ThePrimeagen, Lex Fridman, Theo, etc... Those are so worst. You can't resonate with them.
- cryo32 3mo agoTrick is to ignore people who follow the cult. We went down the earlier Udi Dahan and DDD crap.
- arka2147483647 3mo agoOften the biggest blocker on moving to a new programming language, is the cost of re-writing everything. Cue some story here on a bank or airline somewhere still relying on cobol backend servers. These LLM conversions really seem to make modernization of large parts software layers possible!
- geraneum 3mo ago> Cue some story here on a bank or airline somewhere still relying on cobol backend servers. There's existing money and expertise in those environments to rewrite the whole thing, yet they don't. You may loan them free engineers/experts and they might still not rewrite anything.
- marcus_holmes 3mo agoIt's a clean-cut financial decision. The existing system works. Yes, it costs a lot to maintain, and you could definitely reduce that if you moved to a more modern system. So now you're talking payback periods. Cost of development / maintenance cost savings per year = number of years before you pay back the project. Problem is, that the cost of the development is often unclear, and the maintenance cost savings, while definitely above zero, and often unclear, and approximated the numbers usually come to a payback period in decades. And that's without the usual tech caveats; We can't promise there won't be bugs. We can't promise deadlines will be met. We can't promise the project will succeed at all. We can't promise existing functionality will be faithfully reproduced in the new system. The normal risks around any software dev project. All in all, it looks really expensive and really risky compared to just doing nothing and running the same old system for another five years. Source: I helped do some of the maths on this for a Y2K project.
- rixed 3mo ago> the biggest blocker on moving to a new programming language, is the cost of re-writing everything In 2026, not sure if it was satire. Do some people truly believe that all their software stack has to be single tech, from device drivers to end user apps? Does that extend to remotely accessed services?
- egorfine 3mo ago> significant part of the rust community consists of software talibans I seriously don't get it though. Rust is a nice language, but so is X. However we don't see X people brigading existing projects with constant bombardment with "rewritten in X". What is that about Rust that prompts this behavior?
- jackphilson 3mo agoIt's pretty ergonomic to agents. Like typescript.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- colechristensen 3mo agoRust attracts zealots because of the various kinds of safety guarantees. The speed means it can replace more or less anything. People see the safety as a moral superiority so it attracts obnoxious zealots. Other languages' features and syntax aren't nearly so easy for zealots to form behind. The perception of absolute safety it puts in some people makes them crazy.
- egorfine 3mo agoThis is a good point, actually. Might well be the reason.
- waterTanuki 3mo agoA more plausible explanation: People were told for years they can't use Rust for their new projects because it hasn't been "proven" in industry yet. So the option was to sit back and wait (chicken and egg) or move to rewrite a bunch of projects so that it could actually be "proven". Not saying this is the only reason why it happens (every language has its Zealots) but it certainly makes more sense. Due to the explosion of new programming languages over the past few decades your options are to either aggressively expand wherever possible or die out because you're not "proven".
- 3mo ago
- shawabawa3 3mo ago> Why should a developer use this for anything beyond a pet project? If it _is_ 50% faster, then that's the reason Obviously like any new database it's very risky to use so probably only used for niche use cases at first, but if it turns out to be just as reliable as postgres and faster then why not?
- LtWorf 3mo agoIt probably is 50% faster, probably by skipping flushing data to disk.
- doublerabbit 3mo agoI'll make it 100% faster, skip saving any data to disk.
- 0dayz 3mo agoHow exactly are rewriting something the equivalent of being the taliban?
- skywhopper 3mo agoBecause they are blowing up old monuments as part of an attempt to enforce a hardline but nonsensical purity on other people.
- the__alchemist 3mo agoAs someone who loves Rust the language and tool set: This class of projects [LLM rewrite of a reliable piece of software honed over decades) is embarrassing. If you are watching this and haven't used rust: Please don't judge the language by this part of its users.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bwfan123 3mo ago> All these "rewritten in rust" projects only reinforce the idea that a significant part of the rust community consists of software talibans and not of engineers who must deliver something that works and is reliable over time. Nailed it ! There are some folks who behave holier-than-thou just because they happen to use some language. Language missionaries if you will, and they are insufferable.