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0 pointsStreamBright6y ago0 comments

I guess this mentality leads to the current state of play where all UI related latencies are out of the roof compare to the 80s. At work, I deal with systems that require 16G of heap as the minimum. Funnily when things get rewritten in Rust providing the exact same functionality and the same or better performance the memory requirement goes down 10x (or more). It is up to us how much garbage our systems producing, how much CO2 is wasted on this. I guess many of us are ok with it. While some of us are not. https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go...

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whateveracct6y ago

I've seen multiple production systems rewritten in Rust and the consensus of the developers working on it is that, while the Rust version was more performant, the majority of that performance is attributable to the rewrite itself and not the language. And that a performance-focused rewrite in the original language would have also seen huge performance gains.

As the truism goes, if you require your software to be performant, you must first make Performance a Requirement.

StreamBrightOP6y ago

Sure I bet they feel this way. However, if you look at rewrites like the one at Discord[1], it is dead obvious that the rewrite helped not because of the rewrite by itself but because there is no GC (mostly) and some other smaller things (better data structures for certain tasks). In my experience working a lot for the fortune 500 in the last 15 years is that developers are usually not aware of the low level details of their stack including (but not limited to): networking, garbage collection, concurrency, parallelism. It is the exception (mostly in FAANG companies) when these low level details a very well understood and dealt with. It is no surprise that these companies are picking up Rust because those developers actually understand how much less mental overhead is to work in Rust (once it compiles successfully :) ). I know it is a new language and there are hoops (async/await) but at least we can be sure that there is no need for GC tuning, memory corruption is non existent and a few nice additional properties.

In my mind performance is alway a requirement (and a feature). We just stopped caring a long time ago, because it is easier to think about performance as a hardware or capacity problem, memory as GC problem and so on.

1. https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go...

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