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lllr_finger | 3 years ago
My experience is that choosing Rust just for performance gains usually doesn't pay off. In your case, node already uses C/C++ under the hood, so some of what you're replacing could just be switching that for Rust.
The primary reason I reach for it is when I want the stability provided by the type system and runtime, and to prevent a litany of problems that impact other languages. If those problems aren't something I'm looking to solve, I'll usually reach for a different language.
curun1r|3 years ago
Performance is a complex topic. Other languages can be fast and you’re likely right that with simple initial benchmarks, Rust isn’t going to out-perform other languages by enough to make much of a difference.
But what about consistency of performance? Is your 1,752,974,468th response going to be as fast as the ones in your benchmark? To me, that’s been the eye opener of deploying Rust in production. We saw P100 response times within 10ms of P0. The absolute worst case was below the threshold for human observability from the absolute best case over many months of heavy use. The metrics graphs were literal flat lines for months on end across tens of billions of requests. I have never seen that in any garbage-collected language.
That kind of performance may not be necessary for your needs and you may be able to tolerate or otherwise live with occasional slowdowns. But there are plenty of cases where consistent performance is necessary or extremely desirable. And in those cases, it’s nice to have Rust as an option.