[blub]

Just like Google’s Rust-in-Android blogs this reads like a PR piece (and in the case of facebook also recruitment piece) with some technical words sprinkled in for effect. The overall communication quality is that of a random startup’s “look what we did” posts.

The interesting aspects, such as how they protect against supply-chain attacks from the dependency-happy rust toolchain or how they integrated the C++ code with the Rust code on so many platforms - a top challenge as they said - remain a mystery.

Would also be interesting to hear how much AI-driven development they used for this project. My hope’s that AI gets really good at Rust so one doesn’t have to directly interact with the unergonomic syntax.

[surajrmal]

The point of articles like this is to help build credibility for rust adoption. Rust is still not very widely adopted industry wide, and a lot of smaller players only use established technologies that bigger firms have shown works well. Rust is not inevitable, and articles like this are necessary for its future industry adoption.

[blub]

I had already said it’s a PR piece, you’re merely rephrasing that and making it sound like a good thing.

This and the Google blogs offer zero technical insights and I haven’t learned anything from any of them.

[antonvs]

> The interesting aspects, such as how they protect against supply-chain attacks

There are standard techniques to help manage this that apply across languages, there's no reason to reinvent that wheel.

> My hope’s that AI gets really good at Rust so one doesn’t have to directly interact with the unergonomic syntax.

"Unergonomic syntax" is the battle cry of many people resisting learning a new language. AIs have progressed far enough that they can help you in that learning process, though.

[blub]

The dependency management and complexity/poor ergonomics are the two major technical problems with Rust. Normally the first one’s ignored while the second is downplayed, so it would have been interesting to see what (if anything) Facebook have done about them.

Not only can AIs help, but they can write most if not all the code and spare the human from learning all the intricacies of individual programming languages. Problem is, reports are contradictory on compatibility with Rust. We know they work great with simpler/friendlier languages like Go or Python.