[Analemma_]

It's a bit of an oversimplification, but a little quip I've used when talking about developing in Rust vs. other languages is, it's a question of where/when do you want the pain. In Rust, it's at development time (and hiring and ramp-up time); in C++ it's at runtime; and with GC languages it's at billing time when you have to pay for that extra compute and RAM. There's no way to get rid of the pain entirely.

[willsmith72]

if it were that simple, I'd take the "billing time" payment every time. Engineers' time is the greatest cost for just about any tech business

[scrollaway]

Sometimes billing time is your customer's patience, their phone battery, or other things like that which make your product worse and give your competitors an edge.

[fbdab103]

>...which make your product worse and give your competitors an edge

I would find that argument passable if some of the biggest products from the largest companies functioned better. Performant software seems like a distant memory.

[_aavaa_]

And yet the big tech companies are perpetually re-writing their whole stack, or going out of their way to create new compilers for their language in order to lower their billing time.

[maxbond]

Salaries are dominant in early stage startups, and infrastructure costs becomes dominant as you scale (also probably a SaaS-centric oversimplification). You can get into trouble in the middle, where you have enough scale to be paying jaw dropping cloud bills, but you don't have the staff to move to a cheaper architecture and you may still need to focus on getting new features out to drive growth (or to attract investment).

In startups that chasm is generally filled with VC money paid to cloud vendors, but if you're bootstrapping or not looking to be a unicorn, you probably will want to drive down infrastructure costs much earlier.

[_aavaa_]

I tend to agree with you, but your aside about it being Saas-centric is really important.

One need only open Microsoft Teams to see the “billing time” costs. If the billing time cost is not paid by the developers or their company, then it stop being a cost to them and it becomes an unpriced externality. Who cares, who even knows, that this app we’re writing runs slowly on regular people’s old hardware.

[erik_seaberg]

Rewrites in big tech are a symptom of too many people each trying to demonstrate impact that checks the boxes of an elaborate promotion process.

[riku_iki]

its depends on your app, if you run infra on 100k servers then win can be much larger than cost of engineer.

Or if you write mobile app and became slow and laggy, then you lose users.

[ModernMech]

Yes but there’s a difference in who feels the pain. Compile time pain is felt by devs, who have the constitution and ability to fix such issues. Runtime pain is felt by users and can result in data loss and security issues in the wild, and is harder to debug.

One kind of pain has a bigger blast radius than the other. I prefer compile time pain to runtime pain.