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ExpurpleHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

I'm yet to see a case where manually "hardening" your software is faster than writing a …

… I'm yet to see a case where manually "hardening" your software is faster than writing a "similarly-good" program in Rust. That's just anti-automation. Why repeat the same work in every project and bloat your codebase, when the compiler can carry that burden for you? In my experience, Rust makes you write production-grade software faster than when using other languages. > But selling this approach as a general solution is disingenuous. I agree! There are legitimate cases where releasing a broken prototype as quickly as possible is important. There's room for that. But I agrue that it's not the case for most "serious" production software that would be maintained for any period of time. And that Rust is the preferable option for writing such production software.

Original discussionA Rust shaped hole314 source comments · at import
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BL
blubHN

Many of us strongly prefer handling some complexity ourselves that we can then tackle with tests, CI, fuzzing, etc if it means we don’t have to jump through hoops to satisfy the compiler before we can even see our code running. Yes, Golang and Python and Java are very easy to start programming in. And unless we’re dealing with some really complex problem, like next-gen cryptocurrencies ;), by the time the Rust teams have gotten their code working and nice and proper as any Rust code needs to be, the Golang/Python/Java teams have already released to customers. If one wants to be super-cautios and move accordingly slower to be really really sure they have no memory errors then that’s fine. There’s a market for that stuff. But selling this approach as a general solution is disingenuous.

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imtringuedHN

Yeah, the thing is, the moment your software has crossed the boundary of success, it becomes a burden, not a blessing. You are now stuck with it and you better have made sure that you're happy with it the way you built it, because you're not moving on from this project any time soon. Maybe Rust isn't optimized for throwaway projects and that's fine.

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BL
blubHN

The idea that one needs Rust to write reliable software is not only ridiculous at a logical level, it is also contradicted by the fact that Rust is but a tiny, irrelevant subset of safety-critical software or really all software. If it were really “preferable for writing such production software”, more people would be using it. But they don’t because the compiler does not carry the burden for you. It puts the burden of writing code in a way that satisfies the Rust lifetime management design on you, and that’s what you’ll be doing forever. There zero proof that Rust software is higher quality than equivalent e.g. Swift or Java. The memory-safety trick only works against C and C++.

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