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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: 0.427s | 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. FridgeSeal ◴[14 Oct 24 10:57 UTC] No.41836318[source]▶
God I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I read these threads.

Can I hire 1000 Rust devs at the drop of a hat off the street? Well, no. Have I ever struggled to find competent Rust devs, or high level people who were happy to learn? Nope.

I would absolutely not be afraid to use it because of “hiring concerns”. If your current devs can’t or won’t learn anything new, they’re not very good at their job. If you can’t or won’t hire because you can’t find a super-senior at the drop of a hat, well, your hiring process is broken and no language will really help there.

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2. jcgrillo ◴[14 Oct 24 13:25 UTC] No.41837336[source]▶
The underlying (absurd) assumption is that the sum total potential of a developer you hire to do a job is statically determined by their past experience at interview time. This is the problem with "Human Resources" thinking, it fails to account for all the, well, human stuff.

Case in point from the article:

> it is not viable (for us) to retrain a C developer to Rust

What? Why the hell not?

3. sfn42 ◴[15 Oct 24 18:57 UTC] No.41851908[source]▶
I work in a team where we use C# for our backends and React/TS for our frontends. And of course a lot of other stuff, like Docker, Terraform, Azure etc. I would very strongly encourage anyone who suggested introducing different tools in our project, not to do that.

Not because I don't enjoy learning, but because it's a waste of time. I don't need to learn Rust, C# works fine. I don't need to learn Vue, React works fine. I don't see any value in learning yet another tool to do the same job, I'd much rather spend my time getting actual work done and getting better at using the tools we're already using.