[ckwalsh]

I'm in the "Pro-Rust" camp (not fanboy level "everything must be rewritten in rust", but "the world would be a better place if more stuff used Rust"), and I love this post.

They saw some benefits to Rust, tried it, and continued to measure. They identified the Typescript/Rust language boundary was slow, and noticed an effect on their contributions. After further research, they realized there was a faster way that didn't need the Rust dependency.

Good stuff, good explanation!

[9rx]

I'm not sure your characterization is all that accurate.

Originally, they thought they could build a product that worked across many languages. That necessitated a "lowest common denominator" language, which is a void that has always been strangely lacking in choice, to provide an integratabtle core. Zig had only been announced a few months earlier, so it wasn't really ready to be a contender. For all intents and purposes, C, C++, and Rust were the only options.

Once the product made it to market, it became clear that the Typescript ecosystem was the only one buying in. Upon recognizing the business failure, the "multi-language" core didn't make sense anymore. It was a flawed business model that forced them into using Rust (could have been C or C++ instead, but yeah) and once they gave up on that business model they understood that it would have been better to have been written it in Typescript in the first place — and it no doubt would have been if it weren't for the lofty pie in the sky dreams of trying to make it more than the market was willing to accept. Now they got the opportunity to actually do it.

[burnt-resistor]

> I'm in the "Pro-Rust" camp (not fanboy level "everything must be rewritten in rust", but "the world would be a better place if more stuff used Rust")

While techno-religiosity is irrational and unprofessional, but that's some weak, eye-rolling both-sidesism.

The world would be a better place™ if more stuff used better and more formal tools and methods to prove that code is correct and bug-free. This is easier in some languages than others, but still, there's a lot of formal verification tools that aren't used enough and methodology patterns and attitudes that are missing from crucial projects and regular use. Effective safety and security assurance of software creation takes effort and understanding that a huge fraction of programmer non-software engineers don't want to undertake or know anything about. This needs to change and is defensible, marketable expertise that needs to be appreciated and cannot be replaced by AI anytime soon. There's no "easy" button, but there are a lot of "lazy" "buttons" that don't function as intended.