Rust lacunae [LWN.net]

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 11, 2021 13:48 UTC (Fri) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779)
In reply to: Rust lacunae by roc
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Do you have any references that Google is adopting Rust at any scale? So far, it seems to be very small swaths of Rust that get hyped up by the media. No large-scale rewrites of anything (unlike for Go, in which actually a fair bit of internal projects have been retasked).

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Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 11, 2021 14:06 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (17 responses)

There are a bunch of efforts. The one with the widest impact is their efforts to integrate Rust into Linux kernel and Android

https://security.googleblog.com/2021/05/integrating-rust-...

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 11, 2021 14:15 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Ah, missed out on the second link

https://security.googleblog.com/2021/04/rust-in-linux-ker...

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 11, 2021 14:18 UTC (Fri) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (15 responses)

That's precisely the kind of small-scale adoption I was talking about. Nothing at scale, no big rewrites, hyped by the media.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 11, 2021 14:27 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (14 responses)

> That's precisely the kind of small-scale adoption I was talking about. Nothing at scale, no big rewrites, hyped by the media.

Which media? Also, integrating Rust into Linux kernel and Android isn't exactly what I would consider small-scale.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 11, 2021 14:33 UTC (Fri) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (13 responses)

The tech media?

Google's scale is staggering. Around 100B of lines of C++ by now (I don't have updated numbers). In comparison, the Linux kernel with its ~30M LOC is a drop in the ocean; assigning one or two engineers onto looking at the prospect of maybe writing device drivers in Rust one day, even more so.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 11, 2021 15:16 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Really sounds like you're moving the goalposts.

- Rust isn't used anywhere at Google. <shown uses>
- Oh, it's being looked at for Linux drivers, that's meaningless at the scale of Google.

As if on day 1 there has to be millions of lines of code for it to be meaningful. There is massive momentum for these kinds of things and it takes time. Google having their pet language probably has way more buy-in from management and whatnot, so that specific comparison isn't really useful in my mind.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 11, 2021 18:08 UTC (Fri) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link]

_I_ am not moving the goalposts. It was said that Google was adopting Rust, and that this was proof of C++'s unsuitability. I pointed out that Google has a comparatively tiny adoption of Rust (at least to my knowledge), and now I'm suddenly being asked to defend the position “Rust isn't used anywhere at Google”? That's a strawman. I mean, Google uses x86 assembly code, too, but not at any large enough scale that it shows intent to move from C++ to assembly.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 11, 2021 17:08 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (10 responses)

> The tech media?

Too vague. Which article(s) are you referring to?

> Google's scale is staggering.

Yes and the fact that they have shown significant interest and movement towards integrating Rust into projects with massive user bases like Linux and Android is yet another evidence of growing large scale adoption by multiple companies across many different industries. This is the only realistic way you are ever going to see adoption of any new(er) language. It won't be massive code dumps of millions of lines of code one fine day.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 12, 2021 9:39 UTC (Sat) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (9 responses)

"Significant" is what is being challenged. There has been exactly zero evidence of any significance. Every big company fools with anything you can think of, from Forth to Haskell. It will be a long time before any significance can be demonstrated, if ever. In the meantime, it is not honest to assume it.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 12, 2021 10:19 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (5 responses)

> "Significant" is what is being challenged. There has been exactly zero evidence of any significance. Every big company fools with anything you can think of, from Forth to Haskell

Calling all the existing adoption and momentum from several major players as zero evidence or fooling around is pretty dismissive. This isn't remotely comparable to Forth or Haskell. We are talking about code in production from Mozilla, npm, discord, dropbox, cloudfare and so on. I can't think of any other language comparable to C or C++ that has gotten this level of traction in this timeframe. Feel free to continue overlooking this and we will find out even more conclusively in a few years.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 13, 2021 18:47 UTC (Sun) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (4 responses)

Which part of "In the meantime, it is not honest to assume it" are you confused about?

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 13, 2021 19:11 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

> Which part of "In the meantime, it is not honest to assume it" are you confused about?

I just don't agree with your opinion. There is no confusion around that.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 13, 2021 20:07 UTC (Sun) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

Just so we are clear, you are assuming despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that the amount of Rust usage at Google, relative the scale of its operations, is significant, and furthermore think it is honest to present such a tale.

Your relationship with truth is duly noted. I will not need any further information.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 13, 2021 20:14 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> Just so we are clear, you are assuming despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that the amount of Rust usage at Google, relative the scale of its operations, is significant, and furthermore think it is honest to present such a tale.

That's not accurate. My comments weren't limited to Google.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 13, 2021 20:36 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

ncm: as a relatively unbiased observer (liking both C++ and Rust)... your arguments are not covering you with glory here. Rust is seeing *substantial* usage -- yes, it's not more usage than the entire installed base of C++, but expecting anything of the kind is utterly ridiculous: the language is younger and hasn't had massive adoption for its entire lifetime (of course it hasn't), so its effective lifetime in terms of large-scale usage is shorter than that. But it definitely *is* seeing large-scale usage. Not higher usage than C++, no, not yet -- but ask which language is growing faster, and which language new projects are being written in, and I'd be astonished if you answered C++.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 12, 2021 23:24 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Neither Forth nor Haskell are considered as possible C++ replacements by Google and Microsoft. Rust is in that list. Which not very long, BTW. Less than half-dozen languages were considered… Swift was considered, too and while some technical issues were found they looked fixable but the fact that there are no “Swift Foundation” and Apple doesn't plan to relinquish control any time soon was the deal-breaker.

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 15, 2021 19:43 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Forth scores when you're writing a small program for storing in EPROM or stuff like that. And that means that it's small enough to vet thoroughly for errors.

And of course, Forth also has the reputation of producing executables that are smaller than well-written assembler :-)

Writing a KLOC and more program in Forth would probably be a bit of a nightmare.

Cheers,
Wol

Rust lacunae

Posted Jun 13, 2021 7:26 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Amazon is investing heavily in Rust. For example, they are running production customer workloads on Firecracker VM that is written in Rust. And they have other products (both internal and external) in Rust.

I don't work in Amazon, but I've heard from my friends there that Rust in practice turns out to be a more productive language than C++ and much easier to pick up. One major advantage is that you don't have to learn the particular subset of C++ and its libraries that is in use in your new workplace.