Embedded Rust in Production?

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.

>Only the author "knew" Rust [...] because the dev wanted to learn Rust

Many such cases. Recipe for disaster.

a.k.a. "resume-driven development"

Typically, devs polishing their resume instead of prioritising business metrics probably means the overall org is on the down slope.

Perfectly normal for people to want to develop their skills and to enhance their value.

The thing is that this is not a developer's decision, this is a management decision. The developer might pitch for Rust or even start developing in Rust but if that is not right for the org then their manager should say 'no'.

So ultimately this is a red flag about management.