[ilovecaching]

I've been using Rust in production for a little over half a year, and my team and I have run into very few issues. We're also calling through the FFI to an SGX SDK and a large C++ codebase, and that's been delightfully painless.

We're all extremely glad we chucked C++ and Go and switched to Rust. Rust isn't just a safer C++, it's a language that stands on it's own as extremely productive, safe, and fun to write. We combat the learning curve by giving people the O'Reilly book and the main Rust book, and we find new team members becoming productive in about a week. The Rust community is also amazing, and Cargo + RLS are the best ecosystem tools I've seen in any language.

I highly recommend Rust. If you have any questions, feel free to ask here. We're extremely bullish on Rust continuing to accelerate.

[EeThahs2]

> Cargo + RLS are the best ecosystem tools I've seen in any language.

In my experience the java profilers and debuggers are still better than anything that's available for rust.

RLS is great on a fundamental level (decoupling IDE from compiler), but it still has to catch up in functionality with the total compiler integration that for example eclipse has with ecj.

[ilovecaching]

We don't use Java. Java is old, of course it has plenty of tooling, but it also has a mountain of negatives in it's own right, besides the fact that it's not suitable for systems level work.

[pjmlp]

I guess it is a matter of what kind of systems one is developing, given its use in embedded platforms.

[freeopinion]

You switched from C++ to Rust and don't use Java because Java is old.

You've made at least one person's mood a little lighter today. Thank you.

[maggit]

You misread. Java being old is counted as a positive here; Java is old, so it has plenty of tooling, is the message. Despite this, they are not using Java :)

[pjmlp]

Yep, Rust still needs to do a lot to catch up with Java and .NET eco-systems.

[ilovecaching]

Not really, like I said, java isn't really suitable for systems level work, or a good choice for FFI to C/C++. There are also a lot of disadvantages to using Java. Java lacks some of the compile time safety features of Rust. It has high level features like Sum types that Java does not have. The owners of Java have also sued reimplementors as well, which I think should give anyone pause about using it to do business with.

[pjmlp]

As I mention in another thread, it is a matter of what kind of systems level work you mean, given its successful use in embedded platforms, namely military, office devices, manufacturing automation and IoT.

Kotlin and Scala have Sum types, and Rust still needs to catch up with Scala's type system.

The owners of Java only sue reimplementors that don't respect licenses, like Microsoft and Google.

None of other commercial third parties has had any issue with Java owners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines#...

Naturally I am not advocating for you to use Java instead of Rust, rather that it also has its uses in system work, and it is a valid option in scenarios where having a GC enabled language isn't a problem.

[mercurial]

Rust is amazing (but also frustrating), but RLS is, frankly, terrible. It is unreliable, slow and unstable.

[lasagnaphil]

As of now, the Rust IntelliJ plugin combined with CLion provides the absolute best Rust IDE experience (it even gives you a visual debugger that works as it’s supposed to...)

[tayo42]

When you switched was it a unanimous decision to write rust? And is this a small team where you all have the same opinion? Or did you have to drag any one along? From what I have seen people who aren't motivated to learn rust struggle. I'm curious how that worked out

[ilovecaching]

There was some convincing, we had to sell why we felt Rust was worth rewriting some of our tools in, and that it was ready for primetime. An initial small group of us spiked and wrote integrations for our logging, tracing, and wrote a Rust compiler for our rpc IDL. After that, we kind of got some shocked reactions as to how we were able to move so quickly and that things actually seemed to 'just work'. We also kept evangelizing, giving internal talks, and just generally pushed the snowball until it gained enough momentum that it became clear that Rust was a win.

[protomyth]

Did you lose any developers during this period?

[ilovecaching]

No, in fact it's been a selling point in our hiring. Rust seems to jive with a wider audience, it has aspects of FP, C++, and the tooling solves a lot of pain points for more seasoned developers and has energized some of our employees who felt burnt out on pushing our older services forward.

[dman]

What domain are you working in?

[sgtnasty]

I am learning Rust now, in an attempt to redo some Python scripts that run too slow (using threading). I was going to go with C (worked with it for years back in the 90's), until I stumbled upon Rust.

Rust is so easy to install and get up and running on any platform. But I am getting increasingly frustrated with documentation of many crates I try to use which were so easy in Python. For example serde, log4rs, clap (docs are pretty good).

For example, I can not find any way to change the log level in the log4rs implementation at runtime, or how to configure formatters with the yaml file.

[mehrdadn]

Would you have any sort of stats on your productivity with C++ vs. Go vs. Rust?

[ilovecaching]

It's hard to measure productivity, but one thing I'd like to point out about Go is that is has relatively few productivity feature. It's main advantage is that's simple, but with automatic derivation, traits, closures, real enums (sum types), Rust actually provides more high level niceties than Go. We can also encode rules using the richer type system of Rust over Go or C++, things like state changes can be verified at compile time via phantom type for example. Expression based programming coupled with the borrow checker allows us to write expressive code that is also efficient.

I'm not going to claim that we have proof the Rust is more productive than Go or C++. I see some concrete advantages, however, Rust may simply better suited to the work we're doing. We might just enjoy writing it and therefore work faster.

The way I see it is that Rust guides you to better architectures, it offers a lot of very powerful features from FP and PL theory, and it's all engineered to make sense as a language. In that way, I think it's similar to Go in that they're both engineered while C++ has a lot of fossilized layers and has been organically grown for decades now. We have C++ code from half a decade ago that looks nothing like what we are writing now. It's this organic beast that has a lot of baggage. Rust and Go are engineered from the ground up, and with Rust editions I think they will avoid becoming the organic beast that C++ is now.

[gameswithgo]

It probably depends greatly on what you are doing. There is a lot of work where I would be much more productive in Go because I have yet to really master Rust, as it is a big and complex language while Go is so simple. But I have also made a library where the various meta-programming features in Rust saved me thousands of hours of work and ongoing maintenance compared to what it would have taken to recreate it in Go.

Similarly, the productivity difference will depend on how much run-time performance you need. It might be take longer to make Go code very fast if you need very fast. Having to work around the garbage collector, and avoiding interface {} etc.

[jcelerier]

> We have C++ code from half a decade ago that looks nothing like what we are writing now.

well, Rust code from half a decade ago is also somewhat distinct from today's rust.. even basic cases don't compile anymore : http://progopedia.com/language/rust/

[burntsushi]

Half a decade ago, Rust 1.0 didn't exist. The language was explicitly unstable.

[blub]

I'm very skeptical that one can transition a team to another language and have everything go perfectly.

To summarize:

* learning curve successfully flattened to a week by... reading two books.

* painlessly interacting with a large C++ code base

* no team member dislikes the change, instead they're feeling energized and this has even brought back some from near-burnout.

* Rust is extremely productive

I can accept that the tooling's good, community's nice and type system's a pleasure to use, sure. But people don't change so easily and such drastic changes in large code bases don't go right by default.

If all of what you said above were true, every C++ codebase would have been switched yesterday.

[kjeetgill]

Out of curiosity, what are you building and with what company?

[Nelkins]

What do you use as your development environment?

[ilovecaching]

vim + w0rp/ale, ale has LSP support and I now use it as a one stop shop for go to dec, find refs, and autocomplete. It has support for linting with cargo, rustc, rls, and autoformatting with rustfmt. rustup makes installing rls extremely painless.

[imc]

mind sticking up the relevant sections of your vimrc somewhere so I could take a look?

the rust stuff in my vim dates to v. early post 1.0 and would love to link ale + rls up.

[ilovecaching]

Sure, install w0rp/ale using your favorite plugin manager, install rustup and run:

  rustup component add rls-preview rust-analysis rust-src --toolchain nightly

then add this to .vim/ftplugin/rust.vim:

  let b:ale_linters = {'rust': ['rls','cargo','rustc']}
  let g:ale_fixers = {'rust': ['rustfmt']}
  let g:ale_completion_enabled = 1

[imc]

perfect, thanks!

[mamcx]

IntelliJ IDEA CE is way better than VS Code, IMHO. Much more reliable in the type inference.

[pitaj]

In my experience, the majority of the community uses VSCode with the RLS plugin or IntelliJ with the rust plugin (which is, ironically, written in Kotlin)

[Sawamara]

Can you link to the aforementioned books?

[Sean1708]

I suspect these two:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/2018-edition/index.htm...

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920040385.do

[ilovecaching]

Yes, those are the sacred texts. I do believe the O'reilly book is worth paying money for. It's extremely well written, and I think it's painstakingly crafted pictures of memory layouts and thorough coverage of lifetimes and traits are tremendously helpful.

[Sawamara]

Thank you. Well, now I have to choose whether I prefer the physical copy or the Safari subscription... :D

[bacon_waffle]

For me, the ebook version on my laptop in Calibre has been great; no regrets buying that, instead of the dead tree version.

It's a nice complement to the open-source Rust book too, which may as well be read in digital form.