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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: 0.767s | 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. marhee ◴[14 Oct 24 11:55 UTC] No.41836673[source]▶
Did you not offer to rewrite it in Python? I was a techical director at a company where we worked a lot with frontend contractors. Some loved typescript others were fans of vanilla js. When the balanced tipped there were rewrites from one to the other (ts to js to ts again), the first one two months full time, the second was interspersed with feature development. Of course the developers were very happy they could do it; it improved the solutions and afterward they both had 1) extreme product ownership 2) excellent company problem domain knowledge. So, a win-win for everyone. So I think, especially as it is a smaller part, than translating back in to Python would be warranted (provided you like it and would stay a while), not a big deal and a quite natural option.
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2. melodyogonna ◴[14 Oct 24 15:39 UTC] No.41838548[source]▶
I don't think it needs rewriting if the original version was in Python. What you need to do is return the original Python version
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3. loa_in_ ◴[16 Oct 24 13:36 UTC] No.41858900[source]▶
It isn't necessary, that's true. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be beneficial.