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by dragonsh 1375 days ago
> Many,many smart people…

True and if you look inside the code you can see the stated features are a result of underlying engine from those smart people (TiKV [0] in C and rust from pingcap). Surrealdb is standing on shoulders of giants at present, they are TiKV, FoundationDB and rocksdb. The feature set they mentioned mostly coming from TiKV at present.

[0] https://tikv.org/
1 comments
IshKebab 1374 days ago
I think TiKV is pure Rust no?
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dragonsh 1374 days ago
TiKV is written in rust but then it depends on crates which use C and libc. Rust complements C, it is not an alternative to C, just another alternative to C++.

May be 20-30 years down the line, if it stays may be enough OS and libraries are built in native Rust without C then it might displace it, but at the moment Rust depends on C.

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IshKebab 1374 days ago
Rust is absolutely an alternative to C. The fact that Rust currently depends on C libc on some platforms is a pure implementation detail, and I believe there is ongoing work to remove that dependency.
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dragonsh 1373 days ago
C is implementation detail and that's what make it irreplaceable in short period of time. In my view Rust story will be similar to C++ if it continues to stay relevant for next 20-30 years and will be another alternative besides C++.

Right now Go is miles ahead of Rust when it comes to libraries and ecosystem. So it needs to catch up and once it overcomes Go popularity it might be nearer to C++. C is a different beast and will continue to be there it's the lingua franca of hardware programming and abstraction, unless something simpler comes and takes over which will also be 2-3 decades.

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IshKebab 1373 days ago
> Right now Go is miles ahead of Rust when it comes to libraries and ecosystem.

I'm not sure that's true. A couple of years ago sure, but Rust is growing very fast.

I also think there's no reason to think C will stay around forever. The C ABI will be the lingua franca, but that doesn't mean you need to actually use C.

The only reason it has persisted for so long is lack of alternatives, but now we have at least Zig and Rust. Obviously there's a ton of momentum so it will still take a while to be replaced but I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. musl switches to Zig or Rust fairly soon.

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dragonsh 1371 days ago
> I'm not sure that's true

I am sure its true, given Kubernetes, Docker and related projects, CockroachDB, prometheus, influxdb, nomad, otto, consul, grafana, terraform, snap, juju, Caddy, SeaweedFS, minio, milvus, syncthing, cilium are some of the examples in Go. Indeed it will be safe to say Go is one of the prominent language like Java, Python, C, C++ powering the internet. Rust still has a mountain to cross to reach even half as much usage as Go, except TiKV, Rust itself and Servo I don't see large open source software in Rust yet.

There is a lot of talk about it on HN and may be given 20-30 years it might become more widespread. Rust is still recovering from its failure of Servo not being used by Mozilla, given it failed to live up to expectations of replacing C++ in Firefox due to performance issues and resolving them within time constraints of project budget.

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gregwebs 1374 days ago
It does use RocksDB which is c++. But the result would probably be less stable if that had to be Rust as well.
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