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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

I have a serious question: Is anybody using Rust in production? I mean, I have seen so many countless blogs about it, but I have yet to hear it being used seriously.

At this point it looks like it is just a lot noise/marketing but no real large scale deployments yet and why is this?

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https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html

Lots of names that will be familiar to the HN crowd on there: Dropbox, Coursera, Habitat (Chef), Postmates, Sandstorm...

Also, Mozilla's logo is up there, but it's in Firefox now, specifically. Just a small amount of code, though hundreds of millions of users is a big deployment.

FWIW, I'm using it for https://imageoptim.com/api — it's an image compression API. Rust is at its very core (with high-level fluff in NodeJS). It's not large scale yet, but that's only because I'm just starting.

Rust is working great. It's stable and reliable. I don't love Cargo, but it's still sooo much better than autotools.

I've got efficiency I need for pixel-pushing, and I'm not worried that an off-by-one error will get my servers owned.

Why don't you like Cargo? Do you use pure Rust or have FFIs to C libs?

Wired has an article describing how Dropbox switched over to Rust as they moved away from AWS:

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-amaz...

It takes time to build things.

> At this point it looks like it is just a lot noise/marketing but no real large scale deployments yet and why is this?

Maybe because unless you're building a new product from scratch (that fits Rust's use case), it's hard/impossible to either convince your boss or your team to switch?

We've seen success with people using it as part of a stack, rather than a new product. For example, Coursera, which didn't change their product, but integrated Rust into their deployment structure. Or Skylight, which re-wrote a Ruby gem from Ruby into Rust, without changing anything else about the rest of their product.

From what I can tell, there are plenty of production uses that are specialized enough to not really be shareable. There aren't any killer frameworks to attract the same attention products from other languages might get.

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