[sharifhsn]

This is a miscommunication between the values of “shipping” which optimizes for fastest time to delivery and “correctness” which optimizes for the quality of the code.

Rust makes it easy to write correct software quickly, but it’s slower for writing incorrect software that still works for an MVP. You can get away with writing incorrect concurrent programs in other languages… for a while. And sometimes that’s what business requires.

I actually wish “rewrite in Rust” was a more significant target in the Rust space. Acknowledging that while Rust is not great for prototyping, the correctness/performance advantages it provides justifies a rewrite for the long-term maintenance of software—provided that the tools exist to ease that migration.

[josephg]

Lately rust is my primary language, and I couldn't agree more with this.

I've taken to using typescript for prototyping - since its fast (enough), and its trivial to run both on the server (via bun) or in a browser. The type system is similar enough to rust that swapping back and forth is pretty easy. And there's a great package ecosystem.

I'll get something working, iterate on the design, maybe go through a few rewrites and when I'm happy enough with the network protocol / UI / data layout, pull out rust, port everything across and optimize.

Its easier than you think to port code like this. Our intuition is all messed up when it comes to moving code between languages because we look at a big project and think of how long it took to write that in the first place. But rewriting code from imperative language A to B is a relatively mechanical process. Its much faster than you think. I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.

[theshrike79]

I'm in a similar place, but my stack is Python->Go

With Python I can easily iterate on solutions, observe them as they change, use the REPL to debug things and in general just write bad code just to get it working. I do try to add type annotations etc and not go full "yolo Javascript everything is an object" -style :)

But in the end running Python code on someone else's computer is a pain in the ass, so when I'm done I usually use an LLM to rewrite the whole thing in Go, which in most cases gives me a nice speedup and more importantly I get a single executable I can just copy around and run.

In a few cases the solution requires a Python library that doesn't have a Go equivalent I just stick with the Python one and shove it in a container or something for distribution.

[timschmidt]

> Rust makes it easy to write correct software quickly, but it’s slower for writing incorrect software that still works for an MVP.

I don't find that to be the case. It may be slower for a month or two while you learn how to work with the borrow checker, but after the adjustment period, the ideas flow just as quickly as any other language.

Additionally, being able to tell at a glance what sort of data functions require and return saves a ton of reading and thinking about libraries and even code I wrote myself last week. And the benefits of Cargo in quickly building complex projects cannot be overstated.

All that considered, I find Rust to be quite a bit faster to write software in than C++, which is probably it's closest competitor in terms of capabilities. This can be seen at a macro scale in how quickly the Rust library ecosystem has grown.

[nu11ptr]

I disagree. I've been writing heavy Rust for 5 years, and there are many tasks for which what you say is true. The problem is Rust is a low level language, so there is often ceremony you have to go through, even if it doesn't give you value. Simple lifetimes aren't too bad, but between that and trait bounds on some one else traits that have 6 or 7 associated types, it can get hairy FAST. Then consider a design that would normally have self referential structs, or uses heavy async with pinning, async cancellation, etc. etc.

I do agree that OFTEN you can get good velocity, but there IS a cost to any large scale program written in Rust. I think it is worth it (at least for me, on my personal time), but I can see where a business might find differently for many types of programs.

[zozbot234]

There is a real argument to be made that quick prototyping in Rust is unintuitive compared to other languages, however it's definitely possible and does not even impact iteration speed all that much: the only cost is some extra boilerplate, without even needing to get into `unsafe` code. You don't get the out-of-the-box general tracing GC that you have in languages like Golang, Java/C# or ECMAScript, or the bignum-by-default arithmetic of Python, but pretty much every other basic facility is there, including dynamic variables (the `Any` trait).

[pjmlp]

In an ideal world, where computing software falls under the same liability laws as everything else, there is no shipping without correctness.

Unfortunately too many people accept using computers requires using broken produts, something that most people would return on the same day with other kind of goods.

[littlestymaar]

> Rust makes it easy to write correct software quickly, but it’s slower for writing incorrect software that still works for an MVP

YMMV on that, but IMHO the bigger part of that is the ecosystem , especially for back-end. And by that metric, you should never use anything else than JS for prototyping.

Go will also be faster than Rust to prototype backend stuff with because most of what you need is in the standard library. But not by a large margin and you'll lose that benefit by the time you get to production.

I think most people vastly overestimate the friction added by the borrow checker once you get up to speed.