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.

This question of "what tools / languages" should we use was introduced to me (during an interview, actually) as "technical strategy". There is more to the choice of language or tooling than whether it's fast or slow or reliable at one instant in time -- you have to ask how you will grow and maintain things going forward.

That said, obviously all languages were in that state at some point. Twenty-eight years ago you might have said the same thing about Java. Twenty-four years ago, Perl might have looked like a better choice than Python; now it's clearly the opposite. XenServer took a gamble and wrote their main control stack in OCaml in 2008; on the whole that has had some benefits, but the number of OCaml developers has not significantly grown, and it's not easy to hire people.

That said, I think Rust is much more likely to follow Java's trajectory than OCaml's: My prediction is that it's only going to be easier and easier to find Rust developers.

I don’t love Perl, but we have 10+ year old Perl scripts at work that work fine.

The python scripts of the same vintage have to be reworked because python versions and importantly supporting libraries have changed.

This is mainly because Perl hasn’t changed, with the failure of perl6 to launch. But it’s an interesting comparison.

I’ll agree Rust will be like like Java.

RE: scripts, I find Golang better and better for this nowadays. Uber-fast compilation, to the point of it being acceptable to just instead do `go run your_thing.go` even, and you have access to a very solid runtime and many libraries for most of what people usually need.

I don't argue with the portability and longevity of Perl but it too has its problems.

The longevity of Go is also a thing. I have not encountered a single Go project that used to compile but now doesn't because it hadn't been touched.

Go is in many ways leap years ahead of most AOT languages I've used in anger. Yes, sometimes you miss XYZ, but seldom is that an issue outside of personal preferences.

What you do get though is amazing tooling and little-to-no downtime. Builds basically don't take any time, tests run past, pipelines are quick.

go test ./... finishes faster than you can print Determining projects to restore... to the screen. It's a very liberating experience that is hard to go back from.

Still leaves a lot to be desired versus Object Pascal from Apple/Borland days, or Delphi afterwards.

What makes those better?