Comment by UltraViolence
3 years ago
"Rust has made the decision that safety is more important than developer productivity. This is the right tradeoff to make in many situations — like building code in an OS kernel, or for memory-constrained embedded systems — but I don’t think it’s the right tradeoff in all cases, especially not in startups where velocity is crucial."
I completely disagree with this statement. If a Rust developer takes longer to code some feature this time will eventually be saved fixing memory bugs later on. And don't forget the immaterial cost of losing customer confidence if the product crashes or glitches because of memory instability.
And then I'm even glossing over the enormous benefit of Rust when writing correct multi-threaded code, which is almost always a minefield in C/C++. Code that looks and seems to work OK might in production suddenly crash after a year or so. A complete nightmare!
Memory safety is ALWAYS a good thing to have.
> If a Rust developer takes longer to code some feature this time will eventually be saved fixing memory bugs later on.
You don't disagree at all. "Later on" may never come to your start up , you're actually helping make that point for the author.
My take is that it was always about expanding the pool of people capable of writing safe code, thus making it cheaper.
I spent most of my career in front-end, where such considerations are way down the priority list, but even I was able to produce something in Rust that compiles.
That being said I never understood why would anyone want to use this language for web development - most problems are solved in that space, so if you're not out to tackle tje unsolved ones, it might not be worth it.
> That being said I never understood why would anyone want to use this language for web development
On the backend, at least, Rust would be a significant improvement over Ruby, for example, once a business has gotten past the initial prototyping phase. I've spent years in Ruby development, and the duck typing makes refactoring a production system scary and drama-prone. No matter how carefully you proceed, there will be gaps in test coverage, and you'll regularly see new bugs in production from the refactoring work that would never happen in a typed language. I would gladly work in Rust over Ruby in a web development context. (Although my preferences lean towards Rust, there are no doubt many other typed languages that could do a good job here as well.)