Rust? 🤓

[nelsonic]

Context

Rust has been at the TOP of the "most loved" programming languages list for the last few years: 🔝 https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted

This year Elixir was finally allowed on the survey again and no surprise, it's #2! 💧 😍 In previous years it was excluded from the survey so obviously it didn't appear in the results ... 🤦‍♂️

What?

Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language. Rust emphasizes performance, type safety, and concurrency.

The aspects that appeal to me about Rust are:

1. Types + compile-time type-checking. This is mega helpful in a larger team building more complex software/systems. 👌
2. Memory safety; not crashing mid process! (looking at you JavaScript - and all compile-to-JS languages!) 🦺
3. Performance: execution speed is similar to C so if we need to perform lots of ops fast ... 🚀
4. "Recruit-ability" don't know if that's a word, but you get the idea: finding team members who are passionate about solving problems and writing high-performance code. i.e. the best engineers. Ref: paulgraham.com/pypar 💡

These pros are all great, but the learning curve for Rust is considerably steeper than for Elixir. 📈

We have all dabbled with Rust informally, but haven't had a need for it in a project yet. 🧑‍💻 Recently I've enjoyed watching "Code to the Moon" videos on Rust:

Rust Demystified 🪄 Simplifying The Toughest Parts: https://youtu.be/TJTDTyNdJdY

Rust's Alien Data Types 👽 Box, Rc, Arc:

They have been an acute reminder of how much more complex Rust code is when compared to Elixir.

I feel that we already have a superb Tech Stack with PETAL + Flutter until we need Rust for performance or safety reasons. All the practical reasons why Elixir is a great choice for the product/services we are building are still relevant. And the learning curve for new contributors is virtually flat for Elixir whereas having a Rust-wall to contribution on our core App might put a lot of people off ... the counter-argument is obviously that using Rust would be evidence of our focus on performance i.e. "Never waste anyone's time"

How?

There is a great Free / Open Source Book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book and we have a repo waiting to be populated: https://github.com/dwyl/learn-rust

There is evidence that Rust works on iOS and Android so we could explore those options but AFAIK it's all very experimental ... 🧑‍🔬 But where Rust would shine would be in handling a specific aspect of compute for us such as transforming large data structures. We don't currently have the need for it. Which is why I haven't invested the time to get good at it. I want to resist the temptation to invent a "reason" to use Rust until we have a legit need. But if anyone else reading this wants to proactively learn Rust and populate the dwyl/learn-rust repo ... It would be awesome if it could match the dwyl/learn-elixir in terms of getting setup, basic syntax and examples. I wouldn't be opposed to adopting Rust for a specific performance/safety-focussed element in the stack. For that we could either run it as a Erlang NIF function e.g: https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler or an independent "microservice" e.g. on AWS Lambda or Fly.io 💭

Todo

If you want to work on this.

• [ ] Show your interest in learning Rust by commenting below.
• [ ] Start reading the docs/book
• [ ] Create a branch and make notes in the dwyl/learn-rust repo.

[nelsonic]

Why Rust is actually good for your car: https://medium.com/volvo-cars-engineering/why-volvo-thinks-you-should-have-rust-in-your-car-4320bd639e09

Volvo using Rust in their infotainment. Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32960768

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Flutter Rust Bridge: https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge

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Web Scraping with Rust: https://github.com/kadekillary/scraping-with-rust 👀 Looks like there are already quite a few useful libraries in this space! 🎉 https://github.com/causal-agent/scraper appears to be maintained. 👌

[nelsonic]

Using Rust with Elixir for code reuse and performance: https://blog.doctave.com/2021/08/19/using-rust-with-elixir-for-code-reuse-and-performance.html

[nelsonic]

Still no built-in/Native Websocket in Rocket? https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket/issues/90 🤷‍♂️

[nelsonic]

https://dev.to/bkolobara/writing-rust-the-elixir-way-2lm8