But after a few weeks, it compiled and the results surprised us. The code was 10x faster than our carefully tuned Kotlin implementation – despite no attempt to make it faster. To put this in perspective, we had spent years incrementally improving the Kotlin version from 2,000 to 3,000 transactions per second (TPS). The Rust version, written by Java developers who were new to the language, clocked 30,000 TPS.
This was one of those moments that fundamentally shifts your thinking. Suddenly, the couple of weeks spent learning Rust no longer looked like a big deal, when compared with how long it’d have taken us to get the same results on the JVM. We stopped asking, “Should we be using Rust?” and started asking “Where else could Rust help us solve our problems?”
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