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205 points michidk | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.194s | source
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dazzawazza ◴[] 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. the8472 ◴[] No.41836384[source]
If it's just a few tools that are essentially scripts and they don't even warrant a full-time dev then wouldn't a random senior dev do?

I have had to touch things in languages I'm not familiar with and initially it's slow due to having to look things up, but plenty knowledge still does transfer. Opening a file is still opening a file, updating dependencies is still updating dependencies. Plus python devs should be used to changing tooling all the time ;P