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Embedded Rust in Production?

(blog.lohr.dev)
205 points michidk | 3 comments | 14 Oct 24 06:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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dazzawazza ◴[14 Oct 24 07:56 UTC] No.41835253[source]▶
Access to competant Rust developers can be a challenge even for large companies.

I recently finished a contract at a (very large game dev) company where some tools were written in Rust. The tools were a re-write of python scripts and added no new functionality but were slightly faster in Rust.

The reality was that these tools were unmaintainable by the rest of the company. Only the author "knew" Rust and it was hard to justify a new hire Rust developer to maintain this small set of tools.

The only reason these tools were written in Rust was because the dev wanted to learn Rust (a big but common mistake). I pointed out to the Technical Director that this was a big mistake and the teams had taken on a large amount of technical debt for no reason other than the ego of the wanna-be-rust-developer. Since I "knew" Rust he wanted me to maintain it. My advice was to go back to the Python scripts and I left.

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1. physicsguy ◴[14 Oct 24 07:59 UTC] No.41835268[source]▶
Embedded developers that know Rust is an even smaller pool than Rust developers in general. It’s almost two non-intersecting groups of people since embedded in general is less well paid in many countries and so doesn’t attract people interested in the latest and greatest hyped up language.
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2. ◴[14 Oct 24 08:24 UTC] No.41835432[source]▶
3. Seattle3503 ◴[14 Oct 24 09:43 UTC] No.41835877[source]▶
As a Rust dev looking for a new job, this is my experience. I filter out the embedded jobs because knowing Rust only half the equation for those roles.