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205 points michidk | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | 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. serial_dev ◴[] No.41840444[source]
While I get most of your points, I believe some companies sometimes can or maybe even should experiment with new languages, and see what benefits it brings them.

The important part is evaluating the experiment and having the courage to say “well that didn’t work out, let’s go back to the original version”.

They should have evaluated what is “slightly faster”, how much money it saves and how much it will cost extra to maintain it.