Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/why-aws-loves-rust-and-how-wed-like-to-help/

by carllerche • 6 years ago

492 324 6 years ago

aws.amazon.com

It's nice to see another large Rust sponsor after the unfortunate layoffs at Mozilla

Mozilla management is completely clueless. KaiOS (ex FirefoxOS) is making a killing right now and has become the third most popular mobile OS, just behind Android and IOS. They fired the dev docs team, fired most rust devs and are mismanaging Firefox. Well maybe the people in charge are the ones that are not fit for the company...

cogman106• 6 years ago

Crazy, didn't realize that was still a thing.

All the phones that support it feel like throwbacks from 2003. (It's KaiOS, btw)

ibraheemdev9• 6 years ago

Related: AWS is building a deep bench of Rust talent [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151056

nicoburns4• 6 years ago

I believe that's Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook all looking to get involved in core Rust development (I think partially triggered by the Mozilla layoffs). If anybody was still harbouring doubts about Rust's future, now is the time to lay them aside.

steveklabnik32• 6 years ago

They have (including Google) all been involved to various degrees so far; this is about increasing their involvement.

nicoburns4• 6 years ago

Sure, but from my perspective (you probably had better insight into these companies involvement than me) there was always a question about how committed companies this large really are when they only have a few projects in the language. Hiring core developers puts all doubts to bed (and also the kind of investment that actually for counts for something).

Multicomp• 6 years ago

This is excellent, frankly almost unbelievably good news. On the one hand, I'm still bummed at Mozilla's recent decisions re: layoffs. But with these 3 companies picking up the torch and increasing their investments, that is a ringing endorsement of Rust's viability for greenfield projects (and that compiler checks > coders conventions in improving software memory safety)

Having maybe kicked off a small flamewar with my above comment, I will admit to being curious to contribute to deferring the eternal september of rusts community and how welcoming it is with all the influx of new developers, myself incuded in em.

Theres probably a netiquette equivalent somewhere, but beyond "don't act like the rust evangelism strike force" of n-gate fame, I'm fuzzy as to its details.

SoSoRoCoCo• 6 years ago

Friends of mine that are contract programmers have been ramping on Rust for the past 2-3 years claiming the number of requests for it has been increasing exponentially. I installed it two weeks ago and have been getting a feel for it. It's like if C++, C#, and npm had an offspring. I always hoped Java would make a comeback, but Rust is looking like the real deal.

johnnycerberus6• 6 years ago

Applications of Java and Rust do not overlap. As a big data engineer, Rust does not provide any advantage to me. Good luck rewritting all the big data tools from Java (Elasticsearch, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Neo4j, Deeplearning4j, Cassandra, Solr, Arrow, OrientDB) and all the scientific stuff from C++ (Eigen, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Jax, Halide, OpenCV and the multitude of resources for CUDA and OpenCL) and databases (MySQL, MongoDB). If I want to contribute to LLVM or JVM, they are C++, the browsers are all C++. Unreal Engine and Unity (IL2CPP and engine) are all C++. Are you doing microVMs or drivers? Then probably Rust is a good investment (discutable), otherwise, I would wait for better alternatives. I will stick to Java, Scala, Python and C++ for the foreseeable future.

EDIT: may the downvotes come from the idealists that hammer down pragmatists, like our opinion doesn't even count

smarx007• 6 years ago

I always hoped Java would make a comeback

In order to make a comeback, Java first needs to fall from the TOP 3 languages used by professional programmers in the world.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...

josh2600• 6 years ago

We use rust for everything at MobileCoin. I like to think of the compiler as fussy, but when you make the compiler happy your code just works. No buffer overflows as long as you don’t use unsafe code, multi-threading by default. The audits on our code have basically only turned up logic errors and out of date crates (yes it’s always possible stuff was missed, but it feels a lot different than the C/++ and functional audits I’ve been involved with in the past).

We love it and wouldn’t trade it for a different language at this point.

P.S. we’re hiring remote and sf Bay Area. If you are interested in working on digital cash for use in messaging applications, drop me at line!

spamizbad• 6 years ago

I feel like Java needs to become a lot less popular first before it can have a comeback.

manishsharan• 6 years ago

I don't love Java like I love Clojure but I think Java may stage a comeback with GraalVM: it has cut down startup times to almost match with native C/C++ . I am taking all my java projects meant to run on AWS Lambda and am running it through GraalVM to cut startups time and also memory size.

stjohnswarts• 6 years ago

I don't think Java ever left. It's still used everywhere I've worked in the past 15 years, usually quite extensively. Just because it's not the hot language to talk about on HN it's still out there and quite healthy. Personally I'd been hoping that c# and it's kin would take all of Java's core business, but it really hasn't

throwaway189262• 6 years ago

I don't think Java is going anywhere. It's more performant than JS and especially Python, the other 2 top 3 languages. And unlike Cxx/Rust, you have the convenience of GC. And the new GC's are VERY good.

It has a nice niche where it's less chaotic than JS and has better threading support and uses less cpu/ram than JS and python. But it's still high level enough to not be inconvenient to work with. These traits make it a great fit for beefy back end machines at big companies.

Rust will always be targeted at low level work unless they add a GC. Even with lifetimes etc a GC is just way more convenient

ibraheemdev9• 6 years ago

Even Apple is interested [1]

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-Fr...

johnnujler2• 6 years ago

Great thing but I feel these companies are just too clever for Rust. Rust is a developer’s delight and I don’t want it to become like C++, and I feel the C++ standard got worse especially after these so-called great companies became a part of the standards committee. Or take the example of Web, made worse after the Googles and the Apples of the world got in.

So I have mixed feelings about too many clever people doing too many clever things to an awesome language.

steveklabnik32• 6 years ago

The language team is the sole group of people who decides how the language itself changes over time. Entry into that team is determined by the consensus of the team itself. Anyone can comment on proposals, and of course, a company could hire those individuals, but it's not possible to become a decision maker (or stay one) without the explict consent of the existing set of decision makers.

That being said, we (that is, the Rust team broadly, I am not on the language team) do weigh companies' desires fairly heavily, because we want Rust to be used for real, important things by companies. But it's always a balance. Famously, the lang team even resisted some proposals by the Servo team way back in the day, even though most people involved on all sides were Mozilla employees at the time.

JoshTriplett4• 6 years ago

Rust is a developer’s delight and I don’t want it to become like C++, and I feel the C++ standard got worse especially after these so-called great companies became a part of the standards committee.

On the Rust language team, we are extremely mindful of managing complexity, and we typically err on the side of not including a feature (even if it's desired) if it feels like it adds too much complexity or surface area to the language. We've also paid attention to other language design processes and learned from them.

estebank• 6 years ago

From the article:

Let’s be clear: We understand that we are net beneficiaries of the exceptional work that others have done to make Rust thrive. AWS didn’t start Rust or make it the success that it is today, but we’d like to contribute to its future success.

weego• 6 years ago

My questions are about the domains rust ends up getting traction in, not so much whether it will.

gameswithgo• 6 years ago

Always hard to know these things. It often doesn't follow what would be rational, but follows various accidents of history. Someone in domain X makes a superb library for it, inspiring ecosystem to grow in that domain, even if the language isn't fundamentally suited for it, etc.

malinens• 6 years ago

I remember the same story about go while we had microservice craze. Now it is not a sexy language anymore

dcgudeman• 6 years ago

Why do you think it has anything to do with Mozilla layoffs?

vaylian• 6 years ago

Because some high-profile Rust developers are available for hire again.

mlindner2• 6 years ago

This meme really needs to die. Mozilla never stopped working on Rust, many of the core developers are still Mozilla employees, and the Firefox team hasn't stopped adding Rust-based components.

steveklabnik32• 6 years ago

Who? This is objectively incorrect.

(Well, Firefox adding more Rust is correct, but the rest is not.)

adamnemecek• 6 years ago

Mozilla should have spun-out a Rust consulting company.

kzrdude• 6 years ago

It still can

cogman106• 6 years ago

Not really, they went and fired all their core Rust people.

azakai• 6 years ago

I think that could have worked. There were ideas to do such a thing, as well as consulting around wasm and other stuff. I'm not sure why none of them were actually tried.

dzonga• 6 years ago

people like you should be getting paid the big bucks, not the current exec's at mozilla.

offtop53• 6 years ago

Great to see Rust won't be starved for support.

Now someone needs to take over MDN . By far the best JavaScript documentation

ibraheemdev9• 6 years ago

Why does someone need to take over MDN?

offtop53• 6 years ago

Mozilla doesn't have the money to keep supporting it

luhn• 6 years ago

Firefox laid off the MDN team a couple months ago. https://mobile.twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333...

codethief• 6 years ago

I don't think MDN is going to go anywhere anytime soon. I remember someone on Twitter saying that there are enough people from other organizations who had already been involved in the MDN docs before the lay-offs at Mozilla and that these people will likely stay involved.

Case in point: Both the MDN Github repos and the MDN docs (or at least all the pages I bothered to look at) show very recent activity:

https://github.com/mdn/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web (scroll all the way down to "Last modified")

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/A_re...

offtop53• 6 years ago

Still helps to have paid employees working on it.

I'm happy to see community involvement, but it's such a vital resource that deserves funding

ibraheemdev9• 6 years ago

Is Mozilla going to continue sponsoring the Rust project for the forseeable future? After letting servo out [1]

Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed. Now it’s time for Servo to leave the nest!

Is there any chance they do the same with the Rust language? Either way, Mozilla has done a huge amount of work to improve the systems programming field, and created an incredible language ecosystem in Rust.

steveklabnik32• 6 years ago

We are still in the process of setting up the Rust Foundation, and so you'll see who's sponsoring at that point.

xiphias24• 6 years ago

Hopefully it will be more open with showing where the sponsorship money goes (I hope most of it will go to developers and Rust contributors like you) than other foundations that I don't want to name here.

manchoz• 6 years ago

Because AWS doesn't have his own fancy language.

joseluisq2• 6 years ago

Yeah, like those Gos, Javas, Kotlins, C Sharps and so on. A lot of fanciness rolling across companies.

aDotInTheVoid• 6 years ago

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1248321281474408450

ibraheemdev9• 6 years ago

CloudFormation is not a language, it is a collection of cloud infrastructure

ibraheemdev9• 6 years ago

Microsoft has Project Verona

LukeEF2• 6 years ago

Having developed and launched a database (TerminusDB) built on a Rust core, this makes me slightly nervous. Feels like the evil empire will bring both great riches and great peril to the fantastic Rust community (part of the reason we picked Rust). Guaranteed sponsors for conferences, but also a certain malignant cynicism (am I being too harsh?). AWS will also aggressively compete for the best talent, which is tricky when you are small and open source.

_greim_• 6 years ago

AWS will also aggressively compete for the best talent, which is tricky when you are small and open source.

Barring surges in demand at month-scale timelines, this isn't a zero sum game. Competition for Rust talent will result in an increase in the amount of Rust talent. Even better if you're open source; a growing population of Rust devs roaming the planet can only help you.

LukeEF2• 6 years ago

that is probably fair, I suppose comparing to the python world the financial folk soak up a lot of talent, but the open source ecosystem is stronger and better than ever.

fulafel• 6 years ago

Yep, Rust is especially vulnerable to featureitis because it's already a big language. The more surface area, the more breeding ground for temptations for growing the language. And in its current users a survivorship bias for new feature appetite.

k__3• 6 years ago

Good to read that.

I really like AWS products and Rust is the first system programming language I'm really interested in.

ufmace3• 6 years ago

If they really want to help, the most obvious first step would seem to be to formally adopt and throw some full-time resources at the Rusoto AWS library set for Rust. It's pretty usable right now, but would certainly benefit from the level of testing, helper methods, and language-specific additions that the officially supported AWS libs have.

mjasay3• 6 years ago

It's a good call out, and one that we're actively engaged with. Matthew has done fantastic work on Rusoto and we'd like to be helpful there. Stay tuned.

JoshTriplett4• 6 years ago

I'd love to see this as well.

From a compiler perspective, Rusoto takes a long time to compile. Some of that is just the sheer volume of code, but also, it wouldn't surprise me if it's hitting bottlenecks in the compiler (e.g. a recently fixed issue in the performance of #[derive(...)] on a huge number of structs). Getting appropriate bits of Rusoto put into the compiler's performance testsuite could help, and profiling the compiler on it would likely turn up some areas for improvement.

I would also love to see support for using Rusoto on non-Tokio runtimes. Given the amount of code generation used for Rusoto, abstracting over the remainder (such as the choice of async traits) based on a feature flag would hopefully be feasible.

ufmace3• 6 years ago

Thanks, that's great to hear!

masklinn4• 6 years ago

If they really want to help, the most obvious first step would seem to be to formally adopt and throw some full-time resources at the Rusoto AWS library set for Rust.

Is it really? Seems to me like that would easily be seen as self-serving, while putting efforts into the ecosystem as a whole means even people who don't care a whit for AWS benefit.

ufmace3• 6 years ago

You ought to flip that around actually. Yes it is kind of self-serving. But if they won't do something kind of self-serving like make it much easier to use Rust on their main profit center systems, how committed are they really to making sure the language succeeds? It sounds like a good thing to me for a multi-billion dollar internet giant to have a real self-interest in the language and ecosystem succeeding, and to publicly demonstrate that by maintaining a set of interfaces to their massively profitable ecosystem in that language.

robocat• 6 years ago

If Amazon wanted to be really self-serving, they would encourage the use of high-CPU usage languages and discourage the usage of languages that are efficient. Because AWS gets paid for CPU hours, anything that increases CPU hours of their customers should be good for their business, and vice versa.

Corrado• 6 years ago

I work with AWS quite regularly and this is one of reasons I don't play with Rust more. If we had an "official" Rust AWS SDK I would probably be building things with it.

andrewmcwatters25• 6 years ago

Am I just not "with it?" I don't see the appeal of Rust, but it gets the hottest talk in HN-town.

Maybe it's just because I haven't worked long enough with C or C++ to complain about them (only about a decade or so), but I don't have any issues with those languages. And I find it wholly unappealing to abandon the existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems all in the name of whatever it is that Rust delivers on. I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and experiment with something I can't take off the shelf and be productive with from day one.

I've also mentioned I just can't stand the way the language looks. It's ugly as sin, and I know I'm not alone in that opinion.

I made some crude comments in a previous thread here on HN about Servo, but still came away with the feeling there was literally no one using Servo, the site didn't tell you how to actually use it, and no one cared, but the hype was unreal because it was web tech written in Rust.

Edit: The points on this post are fluctuating wildly. If you're interested in Rust, could you share your knowledge with some of us who are on the fence like me instead of downvoting? It doesn't actually help me understand anything about the language or community other than I shouldn't criticize Rust because its users will downvote you.

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

I haven't used it myself, but my understanding as an outsider is that a lot of the excitement around Rust is that it's bringing a new model of memory safety: with the borrow-checker, you can avoid the performance penalties of garbage collection, while also avoiding the bugs and security risks seen in C.

People who care about such things are really hyped because it's a truly new idea in a mainstream(ish) language.

https://willcrichton.net/notes/rust-memory-safety/

wwright• 6 years ago

but still came away with the feeling there was literally no one using Servo

Code from Servo is in every single copy of Firefox, so it's pretty popular as code goes.

And I find it wholly unappealing to abandon the existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems all in the name of whatever it is that Rust delivers on. I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and play with toys.

Rust doesn't throw away that corpus. Rust draws heavily on that corpus. It leverages LLVM (used to compile C/C++), integrates with C libraries, integrates with GDB, draws a ton of design decisions from actual experience using C++, and so on.

It's a tool that runs inside Firefox, AWS, Microsoft, and a lot of other high-reliability, high-performance areas. It may be young, but it's quickly building (IMO compelling) evidence that it's very much not a "toy." ;)

andrewmcwatters25• 6 years ago

Code from Servo is in every single copy of Firefox, so it's pretty popular as code goes.

This is akin to saying the DWM is in every copy of Windows so it's the most popular graphical compositor of all time.

__0x01• 6 years ago

You are not alone. I think the use of method chaining especially takes away from the aesthetic of newer programming languages.

piercebot2• 6 years ago

One of the reasons it's so enchanting is how it manages memory without the use of a garbage collector thanks to the magic of lifetimes. Couple that with performance that's on par with C/C++ and design choices that encourage testing and documentation... there are a lot of technical reasons to love Rust.

The welcoming community is another great reason, but I'll let community leaders speak to that point.

In terms of how the language looks... the important thing is that `rustfmt` standardizes this, so you only have to learn how to read one style, and not a different style for every developer you work with.

adkadskhj• 6 years ago

Yup - it drew me in as a Go programmer, entirely replacing my Go stack with Rust.

It offers me so many of the joys of Go with more power. Some negatives too of course, but a big boon for me in learning Rust was realizing i didn't always have to reach for the biggest tool. Sometimes a simple Clone or [A]rc was perfectly okay, especially when comparing it to Go - my benchmark.

Rust became as developer efficient for me as Go was, and then more so when i leveraged the huge surplus of code locality tools like Iterators and various functional patterns (.map, etc).

Plus, now i get to play with new toys like WASM without a GC or game engines! I miss almost nothing from Go and gained so much power when i want to reach for things. Most of which, like Iterators, are power with little to no cost.

I've been a Rust fanatic for a couple years now, and C/C++ were not even in my toolbox. I think Rust can hit a lot of sweet spots for a very very wide range of people, eg non-C/C++ domains. Which isn't an argument for its usage, but an explanation for its popularity.

andrewmcwatters25• 6 years ago

I definitely love the rustfmt thing. I think I recall gofmt existing as well?

I feel like C++ can get really out of hand, so not having a cppfmt is surely a thing of jealousy.

adwn3• 6 years ago

[...] to throw away my time and play with toys.

Rust is not a toy. It's possible that your prejudice stops you from seeing Rust's benefits. It's also possible that you're working in a niche where Rust's advantage compared to C or C++ isn't as great as for most other areas of software development. And that's okay, Rust isn't quite there yet. For some very small niches, it might never be.

[...] existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems [...]

Frankly, even with those "decades of knowledge", C programs and libraries are still full of security vulnerabilities caused by C's limitations and memory handling. How many more decades will it take? How many more thousands of vulnerabilities?

joseluisq2• 6 years ago

That's the question, how many UBs and how long more?

cogman106• 6 years ago

I can give you a few reason you might like rust.

    - Instant boot time.  Because rust is statically compiled, there's no runtime startup or anything involved with it.  From dead to alive is pretty much instant.
    - Low memory footprint.  Because rust does not use a GC, it doesn't need all the bits and pieces of memory storage that modern GCs require.  The memory allocated is (close to) the minimal memory needed to run the application.  Further, due to it's low level nature, it's a lot easier to avoid heap allocations all together and instead focus on stack allocations.
    - It's safe to deploy and expose to the internet.  You'd be a fool to setup a public facing C++/or C application.  That memory model is simply too expensive to safely do even if you did want all the benefits of using a system language.  Not so with rust.  Client facing rust services or even just backends that may see client data are safe to push out.
    - It's fast.  Rust has no startup or warmup time.  From boot it is running just as fast as it ever will be.  This means you don't have to have a warmup period or periods of slow runtime as you scale out rust applications.  That consistent performance is easy to plan for.  That speed and low memory usage have the added bonus of making rust really good if you are trying to optimize operation costs.  You can use smaller or less instances to get the same amount of work done.
    - The model model not only makes memory safe, it prevents different types of concurrency bugs.  While rust won't prevent ALL classes of concurrency issues, it will prevent several of them.  That makes it easier to write parallel applications.

Certainly, if none of those things are issues for you, then there's no reason to give rust a second glance. However, I personally see rust as super exciting because of all of those aspects.

brandmeyer2• 6 years ago

Instant boot time. Because rust is statically compiled, there's no runtime startup or anything involved with it. From dead to alive is pretty much instant.

Dynamic linkage is not the slow part of application startup. The slow part (for applications which are slow) is almost always the gathering of non-compiled assets from disk.

IMO, the lack of dynamic linkage is Rust's #2 weak point, second only to slow build times.

toyg3• 6 years ago

Realistically, three of those 5 points are non-issues for C/C++ devs. The last is only relevant for certain types of workload. So you’re left with one real killer-feature of Rust: the safety. It’s a massive feature that cascades very well into pretty much anything you do... but it’s also one feature really - the benefits of which might not be particularly relevant on large established projects who have probably addressed that problem a long time ago (in their own ad-hoc ways). So the cost-benefit analysis of moving an existing codebase from C/C++ to Rust is not exactly a slam-dunk.

For greenfield, though, my feeling is that one should justify why not using Rust, at this point (when building stuff that was previously the realm of C/C++, of course). If it’s just because of unfamiliarity and initial slow speed of development (as people learn it), it becomes an issue of institutional laziness more than a technical choice.

mynameisash2• 6 years ago

The model model not only makes memory safe, it prevents different types of concurrency bugs. While rust won't prevent ALL classes of concurrency issues, it will prevent several of them. That makes it easier to write parallel applications.

Bringing data to this discussion, many of the big tech companies have found that ~70% of CVEs are due to memory bugs (free after use, double free, etc.)[0], and these are prevented by Rust's model.

[0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/16/a-proactive-appro...

m463• 6 years ago

I kind of think it's ugly too.

But I think back many years, when I was put on a project written in Perl. At first I balked at the syntax.

I can see $foo on the right of the equals sign, but on the left? And $_ and @_ and regular expressions everywhere like line noise.

But working with it for a bit... and all of that just disappeared as I became fluent. They just started becoming idioms in my head. And after a while, I found Perl the most expressive language I've ever worked with.

So, maybe you just have to get over the hump?

(But yeah, I thought python was too ordered, but I switched and it's pretty much my favorite language presently)

proverbialbunny5• 6 years ago

Perl was great. I miss Perl. v_v

andrewmcwatters25• 6 years ago

Yeah, sounds like I just need to get over some syntactical hangups.

andrewmcwatters25• 6 years ago

To those taking the time to sell me on it, thank you. I really appreciate you all sharing why Rust is important. I value a lot of the mentioned benefits listed below, specifically wrt speed, but I'm not finding the trade-off there yet.

I work with codebases and projects where the expense of time is far too high to justify its usage, especially in existing designs where there is no meaningful way to extend the codebase with Rust. Believe it or not, but there really are a lot of us out there who just do not have memory (safety, ownership, or otherwise) problems with C or C++.

It sort of feels like the argument people make with static typing vs dynamic typing. It's just not a concern I have.

Perhaps with enough time and coercion I'll find a reason to use it.

AlisdairO• 6 years ago

FWIW I expect you're getting downvoted for tone. In particular:

I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and play with toys.

Implication: Rust is just a toy, people who use it have too much time on their hands, and they're not experienced enough to have good judgement.

IMO if you're interested in a productive conversation you'd probably have better luck if you simply omitted content like the above: it doesn't add to the conversation, and is inevitably going to raise hackles among those who disagree with you.

layoutIfNeeded• 6 years ago

Well, if you hadn’t noticed it’s mostly the same dozen of users upvoting and commenting every Rust-related article on HN.

tomjakubowski• 6 years ago

Short, incomplete list of reasons I prefer Rust, speaking from about five years experience with C++:

* Real pattern matching and sum types. std::variant doesn't cut the mustard

* Traits and derivable impls, rather than obscure operator overloads with fussy cv-qualified signatures

* No iterator invalidation bugs (among the worst C++ issues to debug, IME); no inheritance or need to care about "virtual destructors"; no "object slicing"; no crazy interactions between overloads and templates which require an IDE to determine which function you are actually calling

* Way better compiler error messages than clang or gcc

Each of those "no"s is something I've spent days if not weeks of my C++ career debugging.

dagmx2• 6 years ago

I haven't worked long enough with C or C++ to complain about them (only about a decade or so), but I don't have any issues with those languages

This may be part of the reason. Rust improves on those languages in many ways including better safety, package and build setups as well as doc setups. It's genuinely a breath of fresh air setting up and maintaining rust projects versus C++ or even Python.

I find it wholly unappealing to abandon the existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems

Rust builds on these ecosystems. It uses LLVM as its backend compiler, much like clang does for C++.

Additionally it has great support for CFFI so it can integrate very well into existing codebases with other languages.

I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and play with toys.

I read this as prejudice. Rust isn't a toy as can be seen by the large number of companies and projects that are putting significant efforts into it.

Conversely, perhaps having entrenched experience in the industry means you're predisposed to approaching new paradigms in the field with higher cynicism than may be warranted?

It's ugly as sin, and I know I'm not alone in that opinion.

I think that's very much subjective. I do know many programmers who find it ugly, but many like myself who find it write clean to read.

Certainly I find it significantly easier to grok than C++ or Objective C for example. It's possible to write very elegant rust code that can verge on being Pythonic in nature. It's also possible to write very ugly code too.

there was literally no one using Servo, the site didn't tell you how to actually use it

Servo is a research project from which portions have been taken and integrated into Firefox. That means a lot of people are using servo whether directly or indirectly.

andrewmcwatters25• 6 years ago

I've noticed that Rust uses LLVM as well, but aren't there some significant compile time differences or am I recalling that from Go?

I do definitely wish there was an easier way to go about Rust's C FFI, though. LuaJIT has spoiled me. All you do is preprocess headers and then you have access to all of the exports without having to do any work whatsoever.

k__3• 6 years ago

The Rust community alone is so much better than anything I've seen in my 15 year programming career.

The communities of statically typed programming languages were especially elitist and gatekeeping.

The Rust community is welcoming.

andrewmcwatters25• 6 years ago

I've basically had nothing but downvotes from the Rust community because any time I point something out about my thoughts on the language, I'm wrong and can't have those thoughts.

Some one here in a separate thread said, "I don't understand your hate," and I'm like, what hate? It's a programming language. I don't hate it, I just don't yet find a reason to use it, but maybe I'm missing something really big.

It's not really welcoming at all in my opinion. It carries all of the familiar facets of being a hyped product that people love, and if you question it you're not only wrong, you should be torn down because of your opinion.

sidlls2• 6 years ago

Rust has a lot of deficiencies, like any programming language, but in general what I've seen is that "the community" believes the ownership model/lifetimes and "unsafe" keyword effectively makes it flawless. I think it's dangerous, to be honest, and the community in this regard is not very good--it's filled with people who hype the power of the language well beyond its limits.

falcolas3• 6 years ago

The meme of the Rust Evangalism Strikeforce exists for a reason - because a person can't say anything remotely uncomplementary about Rust without getting dogpiled and downvoted into oblivion.

The Rust community has proven itself, outside of the Rust specific forums, to be exceptionally elitist.

And, as shown in a sibling thread, the founders of Rust are right there on the dogpile attacking the character and dissecting the comments of any dissenters.

renewiltord5• 6 years ago

There's lots of articles for the advantages of Rust. Consider just searching for some of them on Google since they will, in general, be written in a more considered fashion than a response to your comment.

In an effort to be transparent, I will downvote your comment because I like novelty and interesting new things, not the nth version of a BSD is dead or Vim v Emacs discussion, which is what you're spawning.

andrewmcwatters25• 6 years ago

It really sucks on HN that users like you who get past a particular karma threshold hold down users who have legitimate curious questions. It incentivizes not having unpopular discussions, and really turns me off to the site entirely. So could you please not?

This isn't a facetious statement. I'm trying to keep this on topic: AWS loves Rust, so maybe I should, too. Could we have a discussion about why?

The mechanism you're using is probably one of the most irritating features on HN and Reddit to me.

basicneo3• 6 years ago

In a post about Rust adoption, it seems on topic in a threaded forum that commonly discusses pros and cons to discuss pros and cons.

This is an opportunity to educate/advocate. Someone who wants to do that might link to a good article, rather than just attempt to shut down the discussion.

woah2• 6 years ago

There's this odd genre of comment where people sound personally threatened by a language. Why?

andrewmcwatters25• 6 years ago

Why would a person be threatened by a language? I'm asking the HN community why I should reconsider and to share their thoughts on having used Rust.

The world isn't made up of people who either love or are threatened by things. Could you not use this language?

Jtsummers• 6 years ago

It has C and C++'s performance without a lot of the footguns. A better type system. The trait system is a nicer way to extend types than C++'s class system (IMO). Generics from the start, instead of absent (C) or added on and still not fully utilized by practitioners (C++, some practitioners get the value, other offices bar using them). The ownership model means that using the lower level concurrency primitives is less likely to have the subtle issues of C and C++. It also means they could avoid encoding a specific concurrency model into the language (like Go or Erlang) and let those be libraries.

Cargo as a standard build system, package manager, and test runner. This makes for a much more coherent development environment than the tire fire that is C and C++'s build, test, and package management story.

Developing tests is much easier than in C and C++, which means many of the packages are actually reasonably well tested (maybe not perfect, but better than the average C or C++ package you might want to incorporate into a project).

Rust has a pretty good module system. C has nothing of the sort, and C++ has a mix of things that can be used similarly (classes, namespaces) and only recently got modules proper in C++20. This helps a lot with organizing your code into a modular structure and then sharing that code with other projects.

Rust can call and be called from C, so there is no tossing anything out. You can integrate Rust into an existing project one file at a time. Move your more critical code into it, and let other code call it. Going back to concurrency, put the part that generates and manages workers (as an example of one model) in Rust and leave the rest of the logic in C or C++. Gradually migrate the worker logic into Rust, or not. Perhaps it's a library that you don't control or don't want to change.

Some things aren't pretty or aren't clear. For instance, str and String are pretty confusing for new users. But the compiler will catch these for you. Speaking of, actually decent compiler warnings and errors. Often with potential fixes included, which usually do what you want.

In summary: Fewer footguns, better quality of life components, better language features in some areas (type system, modules, in particular), no performance hit (or no major performance hit) compared to other options for languages attempting to offer improved safety (where safety could be along many dimensions).

andrewmcwatters25• 6 years ago

Is it possible to use Rust without much necessary usage of generics?

jayd16• 6 years ago

Am I just not "with it?"
all in the name of whatever it is that Rust delivers on

If you haven't bothered to groc the purported benefits and you have not decided to reject them on their own merits then yeah, I'd say you're just being a grump.

Feel free to not like Rust but your complaints don't show a lot of effort in trying to understand it.

As far as what you lose when you try new languages, you really shouldn't worry so much. A vast majority of your skills as a programmer are portable.

aliceryhl• 6 years ago

The primary reason why I love Rust is that the compiler catches most of my bugs at compile time. For example, I recently spent three full days on writing code without running it at all — I just made sure it compiled as I went along. Afterwards when it was time to run it, there were a few mistakes not caught by the compiler, but I was able to fix all of them in 30 minutes.

That program has been running in production without any issues since then. We use PHP for most other projects at work. I can assure you that this kind of thing is not possible with PHP.

So in short, Rust forces me to think about every edge case and error path, so I can feel confident that my code really works, even in the face of obscure situations.

In fact, this is also the first line in the AWS article in question:

One of the most exciting things about the Rust programming language is that it makes infrastructure incredibly boring. That’s not a bad thing, in this case.

The only language I've had a similar experience from is Typescript.

That it's fast or uses only a little memory is just a bonus for me.

bsaul2• 6 years ago

So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ?

I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust. This post is obviously from an engineer, but i fear the day business people will start looking into ways to leverage the contribution Amazon made to Rust.

sfkdjf9j3j• 6 years ago

I don't think that's what's going on here. Swift and Go were both projects that Apple and Google respectively dedicated a lot of engineering resources to growing into mainstream popularity. AWS would have to spend a decade stewarding Rust the same way to get the same "halo effect".

masklinn4• 6 years ago

So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ?

No? Project sponsorship, either direct or by hiring prominent contributors, have a long history in OSS support and have little to do with "owning" languages.

Did Google or Dropbox take ownership of Python when they hired GvR?

I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust.

What are you talking about? It's literally not their decision to make.

bsaul2• 6 years ago

Imagine Amazon keep hiring all the main contributors of the language and mainstream libraries, then decide to fork the language to add their own custom flavor, under their own conditions.

We're still very far from that point, but i've seen worst things happened in the history of big megacorps.

dagmx2• 6 years ago

I'm not sure that's a reasonable take.

Apple and Google both use Rust too. Amazon also uses other languages.

The languages you mentioned were developed in house by those companies, rust is independent

roncohen• 6 years ago

This post is obviously from an engineer

Not really. The post is by Matt Asay who's title is Head of Open Source Strategy and Marketing. The post reads like an attempt at improving upon the negative image AWS has garnered in open source by making money on open source projects without paying, or sometimes without even crediting, the authors. Most recent examples include Headless Recorder[1] and before that Kafka, Elasticsearch etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24799660

mjasay3• 6 years ago

Totally fair to critique me as a marketer (though that's not really what I do. The only time I've had a true marketing title was when I ran marketing at MongoDB), but I don't think some of the other criticism sticks. We've been contributing to Apache Lucene and Solr (which feed into Elasticsearch), as well as Elasticsearch, for a long time. See, eg, https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-a....

As for Headless Recorder, we're working with Tim now. That was a miss on our part, one that I (and the team involved) regret. But I don't regret you and others calling us out when you feel we've done wrong. AWS is not a perfect company, but I've been gratified that people here (in my experience) want to do the right thing. Sometimes we need help figuring out what's right in a given situation (or, rather, what's the right way to help customers. Increasingly you'll see teams understanding that more upstream contributions might be the best way to help customers in the medium- and long-term, even when it's not necessarily the obvious way to help them in the short-term). So please keep helping us do better.

skybrian• 6 years ago

It can go the other way. Apple started LLVM but can they be considered to own it anymore?

masklinn4• 6 years ago

Apple didn't start LLVM. Apple started Clang (and possibly LLDB?), Apple hired Chris Lattner because of LLVM.

mjasay3• 6 years ago

To be very clear, it's not Amazon's language to take. We are contributing (and I think you'll see us increase our contributions), but we are one of many contributors.

And, I should add, the real contributors are the engineers who do the code. AWS is committing credits/cash/other, but when it comes to the engineering, we are hiring committers so that they have time/resources to continue to do so. But it's those engineers (and engineers from other companies) who are doing the work.

I'm very, very grateful that Facebook and others have also been hiring Rust committers. It's better as a community, not as one company's programming language, even a great company/org like Mozilla.

So, no, don't worry about AWS taking over Rust. We couldn't and don't want to. Rust has done so, so much right as a community-led project: welcoming, inclusive, kind. We hope to contribute to that, not commandeer anything.

013a• 6 years ago

This is excellent; hopefully we get native Rust support on Lambda soon maybe? :)

steveklabnik32• 6 years ago

In what sense? They released a runtime two years ago: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/rust-runtime-for-aws...

bjohnso5• 6 years ago

I think the parent commenter meant as a selectable runtime at deployment time (i.e. directly supported), rather than requiring the bring-your-own-runtime setup that is currently required.

astan• 6 years ago

Mixed feelings, on one hand, I'm so excited about the investment since I'm a big fan of Rust, on the other, I don't want it to be a clusterfuck like IETF and web standards development where companies like Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla get to dictate what is and isn't allowed on the web. I just hope the Rust community is able to stand up for itself and resist inclusion of unnecessary things against these big players with infinite resources.

masklinn4• 6 years ago

I don't want it to be a clusterfuck like IETF and web standards development where companies like Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla get to dictate what is and isn't allowed on the web.

You may want to note that there's a pretty damn big difference between the two: the rust project needs to be interoperable with itself and that's about the extent of it.

The web needs to be interoperable period, so if there isn't some sort of buy-in or the ability to push your weight around, spec-ing or implementing something is just a waste of time.

Putting resources into the language doesn't mean you control it, and volunteer-driven projects go where they will. Python or Ruby are not owned by their sponsors.

rossmohax• 6 years ago

Twitter previously invested in Scala, which significantly contributed to it's adoption outside of relatively small community back then. Another part of success was Spark.

It looks like Rust gains bigcorp support, all we need now is a killer product written in it to kick off explosive growth.

ibraheemdev9• 6 years ago

I totally agree. If a large scale product is written primarily in Rust from the start, adoption in production environments and startups will increase dramatically.

sitkack• 6 years ago

Interviewing for a FAANG job in Rust.

mattgreg• 6 years ago

Want to work with Rust?

Ockam.io loves Rust, and we are hiring!

https://www.ockam.io/team#open-roles

autarch• 6 years ago

The read more button on https://www.ockam.io/team is a 404 (to https://www.ockam.io/learn/guides/team/values_and_virtues_on...).

Also, there's an "Ockam Values" header right below with no content under it. Edit: but not if I go directly to the page. Maybe it was a transient Chrome bug.

db48x• 6 years ago

All I see is blue with a header and footer, probably because my ad blocker blocks google tag manager.

s1k3s• 6 years ago

Why AWS loves Rust

Because it's cool and they want a spot on that poster?

renewiltord5• 6 years ago

Do we already have a list of companies that will be sponsors of the Rust foundation?

steveklabnik32• 6 years ago

There is no public list.

renewiltord5• 6 years ago

Cool. Thank you. Eager to find out in time, though I suspect the language will flourish regardless.

_J_Ten_• 6 years ago

This is huge for Rust. I always had a love/hate relationship with Rust. Love for the language and runtime characteristics. The lack of stability of the ecosystem combined with the small standard lib and the enthusiats/hobbyist mindset (sorry, but that was my impression) was a show stopper for using it in business apps where Rust could be great but was not strictly necessary.

ThinkBeat• 6 years ago

Probably an unpopular opinion but I am not very excited by this.

Getting funding and support is great, but the needs of the many are very different than the needs of AWS and Facebook.

In my opinion we see this a lot in Linux as well. What Google wants has almost nothing to do with what I need. (I said almost).

I think it should gestate a while in a less FAANGy environment.

chabad360• 6 years ago

It should be noted that programming languages are different from software.

AWS is paying developers to primarily work on it's needs for Linux (as that is how Linux is generally maintained, you upstream a module, you maintain it).

In Rust on the other hand (like most/all languages) new features tend to benefit everybody, AWS simply might be able to prioritize development of certain aspects, but they certainly don't get to make work almost exclusively for them.

phendrenad2• 6 years ago

Rust's popularity really is an incredible phenomenon. Amazon positioning itself as a big user and supporter of Rust is just good business. They do not want someone to appear more of a friend to Rust than they are.

ronlobo• 6 years ago

That's great news and will contribute further to Rusts' adoption.

Large codebases will be able to transcode to language X at some point in the future and I am waiting for the day when it can be done for Rust with projects like https://github.com/facebookresearch/TransCoder/

intricatedetail2• 6 years ago

They should pay contributors few millions of dollars each. If they benefited from it they should give meaningful reward. Mouthful words won't suddenly change you from being simply a leech.

oxymoron• 6 years ago

They have hired people who will be working specifically on rust. Just the names listed in the article amounts to millions of dollars invested yearly.

intricatedetail2• 6 years ago

But that should be millions per developer. Maybe developers should lobby RIAA, so that companies like Amazon would have to pay royalties for every line of code used. You know they make billions of off that work and yet some developers can't afford even their own place to live. This exploitation must end!

blub• 6 years ago

It feels like it was yesterday when HN was praising Tim Bray for quitting Amazon AWS [1] over the firing of whistleblowers. And on the other hand we have what appear to be several prominent Rust community members falling over each other to get hired by Amazon and the Rust HN community largely cheering Amazon.

The Rust community seems quite desperate for corporate money and support. Amazon's not paying you out of love fellas, even if it says so in the blog post's title.

[1] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-A...

steveklabnik32• 6 years ago

The real world is a complicated thing. It is very possible to be critical of one part of an organization while working with another. Or even be critical of an organization you’re a part of!

Nobody believes they are doing it solely out of love, but luckily, that’s not required for it to be a productive relationship.

secondcoming3• 6 years ago

People talk about Rust like how people talk about alt-coins. It's really odd and emotional.

ashneo76• 6 years ago

If there is anyone here from the rust community, please please please stay away from amazon. There is nothing stopping amazon and aws. Any thing they do is evil. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196521

If there is an opencollective somewhere, I am not than happy to give you the money directly. I support Mozilla and Wikipedia and other projects to my best effort, and I would love it if others can do that too.

All Amazon has ever done is lip service to open source. There is a multibillionaire at the top with no need for that money who every day costs not to do something good for the planet and is instead enabling commoditizing the general populace.

Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

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