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Embedded Rust in Production?

(blog.lohr.dev)
205 points michidk | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 06:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | 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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nicoburns ◴[14 Oct 24 08:52 UTC] No.41835570[source]▶
> 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.

I can believe this, but it's funny because I work on a project where the main product is written in Rust, and it's the build tools written in Python that are the technical debt that nobody really wants to touch! In our case I suspect rewriting them in Rust will end up being the right thing to do (if/when we can justify the switching costs).

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1. bsnnkv ◴[14 Oct 24 15:32 UTC] No.41838458[source]▶
> I can believe this, but it's funny because I work on a project where the main product is written in Rust, and it's the build tools written in Python that are the technical debt that nobody really wants to touch!

Oh hi! You must be my teammate!

I joined a team like this and just started a personal build/dev/ops tool repo in Rust for things that I needed but were not automated. Over time it has become an "official" repo and renamed to be blessed with an official "org" package prefix.

When I started this project and people were interested, I was asked why I didn't just add to the Python repo; I said that others are free to rewrite them if they want to, but I can't justify spending days messing around with Python to achieve what I can in less than 30 minutes with Rust when I need to quickly automate a tedious task.

Edit: A lot of downvotes on this, but in case it wasn't clear - the team is happy that someone took the time to scaffold a repo in Rust that everyone feels more confident in contributing to, since the overwhelming majority of the codebase is written in Rust and the Python tools repo is full of annoying runtime errors that could be trivially caught at compile time.

The end result is more people feeling more empowered to automate repetitive and tedious tasks which can easily be fudged when executed manually instead of suffering with them because someone who isn't even here anymore decided to start a tools repo in Python for a team that almost exclusively writes code in Rust.