“We rewrote it in Rust” articles with good before/after comparisons?

1

I’ve got a talk coming up where I’m championing Rust to mainly C++ and Python programmers. Does anyone know of any articles/blog posts etc that have good comparisons of equivalent tools written and Rust and some other language? I.e. “our rust service has X% more uptime than our Java one” or “it’s 100X faster than the old Python one”, or “we’ve seen a reduction in bug reports of 60% compared to the old C++ tool”, that kind of thing.

1 Like
2
4 Likes
3

Not exactly the requested genre, but close.

3 Likes
4

Skimming This Week In Rust links might be faster than Google, if you don't get enough responses here.

2 Likes
5

Thanks I hadn't thought of trawling back through TWiR but that's a great idea.

1 Like
6

I like this story by Bryan Cantrill: Statemaps in Rust - YouTube

Bryan is an old hand C programmer. Having been working on Solaris internals and such. So when he starts talking about a language he would prefer to use for systems programming I start to listen. In fact. I think it was that video that prompted me to look at Rust.

The story is about a program that had been implemented in node.js but was found to be far too slow on big data sets. A rewrite of the time critical parts in C sped it up by a fact of 10.

But that JS/C mashup was hard to extend with new features so Bryan took on a rewrite in Rust as a first Rust project. After much arguing with the compiler he gave up trying to be smart and write an optimal solution and just wanted to get it to work at all. The surprising being that the end result was another 40% faster anyway!

Cantrill has subsequently founded a company building server systems. https://oxide.computer They are working exclusively in Rust.

I think that neatly comes up the performance that can achieved with Rust and at the same time how Rust can be used almost as easily as Javascript.

However I would caution against being overly evangelical about rewriting everything in Rust. Unless there is a very good reason, as in Bryan's case. I suspect that will frighten people away if they have experience enough to know what a lengthy, costly, risky proposition that is.

8 Likes
7

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. We invite you to open a new topic if you have further questions or comments.