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by ignoramous 2063 days ago
another stupid question, but can't help it: golang seems like a popular choice among network developers. Any reason that made fly.io choose Rust over golang for the proxy?
1 comments

Because of JavaScript. Really!

We settled on Rust back when we were building a JS runtime into our proxy. It's a great language for hosting v8. When we realized our customers just wanted to run any ol' code, and not be stuck in a v8 isolate, we extracted the proxy bits and kept them around.

I think you could build our proxy just fine in Go. One really nice thing about Rust, though, is the Hyper HTTP library. It's _much_ more flexible than Go's built in HTTP package, which turns out to be really useful for our particular product.