Comment by bryanlarsen
19 hours ago
This is from rustconf. A lot of the focus at Rustconf this year has been C++ interop, Python Interop, Javascript interop -- it's no longer about "rewrite it in rust", it's about being part of the ecosystem.
19 hours ago
This is from rustconf. A lot of the focus at Rustconf this year has been C++ interop, Python Interop, Javascript interop -- it's no longer about "rewrite it in rust", it's about being part of the ecosystem.
Good. As a C+++ programmer Rust has some things that intrigue me. However I have no desire to rewrite everything in rust and so interoperability has been what is holding me back.
We rewrote everything a few years back, completing in 2014 (Rust 1.0 came in 2015) - it costs nearly a billion dollars! I cannot in good conscience go back to management and ask for another billion dollars to rewrite again (Rust might be more productive, but inflation will eat that up, so I expect a rewrite to be more expensive). If Rust can work with my existing code though - I know of a number of small places where there is reason to rewrite anyway because the code is bad (or sometimes was good but not nicely flexible for the features we have added since).
What were you working on that cost a billion dollars to rewrite? Or was that hyperbole?
I'd say you only pay 10% of the cost when you finish/launch the re-written software. The other 90% of cost comes later in the format of operations, deprecation and migration, people both users and devs, community friction and learning cost.
And that 90% could be an underestimate here.
Real numbers. I can't say what directly, but you can make a good guess if you read my comment history. (I don't think this would be worth your time, but you could)
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Rewrite it in Rust has always been more a fantasy of the C++ community than a goal of the Rust ecosystem.
It's definitely been a meme in the rust ecosystem
(but yes, the language team and ecosystem were always making a point of incremental addition rather than full rewrite)