[Sikul]

Original author here. Cool to see it posted again.

We're still using and investing in rust at Discord. For example, in the past year we successfully pulled part of the core messaging system out of python and into a rust service. Rust has been a boon for developer productivity and correctness of code.

We've also been very happy with the way the rust ecosystem is evolving and the amount of adoption the language has seen.

I'm happy to answer questions here.

P.S. We're still growing and hiring (including remotely). You can find my email in my profile.

[jojva]

Something I rarely see asked would be: what's the maintenance story with rust? Do you have metrics about the number of bugs compared to other languages, e.g. go, python? When you have to add a new feature to an existing rust system, is it easier/harder/the same than with another language? How easy is it to read old rust code? Obviously, you won't have 10 year old rust codebases, but even reading something I wrote a year ago can be difficult in, e.g. C++.

[xtracto]

What happened with your Elixir stuff? ( https://blog.discord.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b ). Is it still there or are you using something else now?

[Sikul]

Elixir is without a doubt still one of the core languages. We try to use the right tool for the job and Elixir is the right tool for parts of our system.

We also combo Elixir NIFs and rust to speed up parts of the Elixir services https://blog.discord.com/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-m...

[xtracto]

Interesting. We are researching Elixir for an online transaction ledger (thousands of payments per second) along with kafka. So far thats the technology that seems more suitable. That discord article was really appreciated to understand some of the intricacies of using Elixir.

[fbernier]

I certainly know of a few Adtech companies using Erlang to handle > 1M bid requests per seconds :). OTP is pretty great for that.

[PhantomGremlin]

I'm happy to answer questions here.

I'm really glad this blog post is being discussed on HN. I've learned a lot. But there are also a few foolishly critical comments. You and jhgg should keep in mind: Illegitimi non carborundum.

[dancemethis]

Yeah, maybe if Discord didn't gather all user data and metadata it can on its users, just like its grandfather, OpenFeint.

[lifeplusplus]

is it true the GC problems in GO have been fixed since then?

[Sikul]

rsc said they made some big improvements for this particular type of problem. I'm not sure which version of go the improvements landed in.