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Ask HN: How do you use Rust at work?

4 pointsby s_c_rabout 4 years ago
I like to find ways to use a variety of languages at work when it makes sense. For example, Python&#x2F;Pandas is great for dealing with spreadsheets and other large data sets, Go gives a speed boost over interpreted languages for REST endpoints. JavaScript for front end stuff of course.<p>Try as I might, I can&#x27;t think of any specific use case that makes Rust more compelling than another language for general programming tasks. I don&#x27;t work with anything embedded or otherwise low level where the lack of a GC would be necessary. Are there any tasks you have found Rust to be a good fit for in your day job, where you otherwise might have reached another language?

2 comments

steveklabnikabout 4 years ago
Oxide is using Rust for everything, from &quot;firmware&quot; up through &quot;the backend of our APIs.&quot; I linked to a talk some of my co-workers gave about the API and control plane stuff here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26253928" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26253928</a> . We are still early enough that a lot of this is not public, but eventually everything will be open source.<p>Yes, the technologies you&#x27;ve mentioned are good at those things. But what matters is more &quot;is this technology viable for this task.&quot; This is because requirements are different from team to team. For example: imagine I work at a place where all of our software is written in Java. Let&#x27;s say that Rails is 100% good for building a website, and Java is 90% good. For me and my team, choosing Java may make sense, even if it, in some sense, is not the globally best option. It&#x27;s actually <i>not</i> the best option for me, because I have like, a bonus for Java because I already have a ton of people that know it, and consistency matters. But if you don&#x27;t know Java, but do know Rails, then choosing Rails is the right choice for you. We can disagree on the &quot;best&quot; choice, <i>and both be right</i>.<p>(Now, if there was a tool that was 90% good for a task, and Java was 10% good, that might outweigh the consistency and various other requirements. And there&#x27;s always something that a given tool is 0% good for.)<p>Reducing Rust to &quot;only good when I can&#x27;t use GC&quot; is not appreciating the full things that Rust offers, which is of course, what you&#x27;re asking about. Many people love the tooling, the type system, the performance, the consistency, the low resource usage, the concurrency tools. The lack of GC is incidental, in a sense. For some thoughts on this, from someone who is on the language team: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;without.boats&#x2F;blog&#x2F;notes-on-a-smaller-rust&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;without.boats&#x2F;blog&#x2F;notes-on-a-smaller-rust&#x2F;</a> My main point here is that, Rust doesn&#x27;t have to be the globally best choice for it to make sense to choose Rust, it just has to be a viable enough choice, and that can depend on a variety of individual factors.
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wezmabout 4 years ago
We used Rust to replace font handling that was implemented in C in Prince¹ (which is mostly written in Mercury). This was then extended to include all font shaping and released as Allsorts². We integrate the Mercury code with Rust via FFI&#x2F;Rust’s C interop.<p>¹ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.princexml.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.princexml.com&#x2F;</a><p>² <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yeslogic&#x2F;allsorts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yeslogic&#x2F;allsorts</a>