These days Rust is both my day job language (I work on systems for autonomy in tractors) and my hobby language. It's my preferred tool.
I have attempted similar systems in C++ before, and got fairly far along at times. But Rust really solves a lot of problems, I tear my hear out a lot less.
This is a "systems" type of application; this is a database and compiler and a virtual machine and language runtime. I'm not super concerned with optimization at this point, but I will likely have to be at some point. Being closer to the metal is key for me on a project like this.
I'm likely to e.g. rip out RocksDB and replace it with my own database engine at some point (something I work on here and there as another side project, unpublished still.) I will also likely need a better garbage collection solution. With Rust I have options.
The community of libraries available for Rust is good. The right tools are there. And the language is expressive enough to make it work well.
That said, I have mulled writing the "host" portion -- the layer that manages network sockets and web endpoints, in Elixir/Erlang:
The 'daemon' portion of the system sits behind an RPC layer built around ZeroMQ -- so that layer can be restarted/upgraded without losing active network connections. Or can sit on a separate machine for scalability reasons, etc. So it's entirely possible to split what I'm calling the "host" (network facing layer, what we used to call a "frontend" when I worked at Google, but most people think of that term as referring to a UI layer) from the backend "daemon."
Anyways for me this project ties together a bunch of interests in systems programming I've had for years. It becomes a kind of synthesis project.
I have attempted similar systems in C++ before, and got fairly far along at times. But Rust really solves a lot of problems, I tear my hear out a lot less.
This is a "systems" type of application; this is a database and compiler and a virtual machine and language runtime. I'm not super concerned with optimization at this point, but I will likely have to be at some point. Being closer to the metal is key for me on a project like this.
I'm likely to e.g. rip out RocksDB and replace it with my own database engine at some point (something I work on here and there as another side project, unpublished still.) I will also likely need a better garbage collection solution. With Rust I have options.
The community of libraries available for Rust is good. The right tools are there. And the language is expressive enough to make it work well.
That said, I have mulled writing the "host" portion -- the layer that manages network sockets and web endpoints, in Elixir/Erlang:
The 'daemon' portion of the system sits behind an RPC layer built around ZeroMQ -- so that layer can be restarted/upgraded without losing active network connections. Or can sit on a separate machine for scalability reasons, etc. So it's entirely possible to split what I'm calling the "host" (network facing layer, what we used to call a "frontend" when I worked at Google, but most people think of that term as referring to a UI layer) from the backend "daemon."
Anyways for me this project ties together a bunch of interests in systems programming I've had for years. It becomes a kind of synthesis project.