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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

Rust doesn't sound too unrealistic, given that they were one of its first big commercial users.

they do rust ? fun

They use Rust in the datacenter. The layer that actually writes bits to disk is written in Rust. I don't know why they haven't yet deployed a native desktop client that's a Rust core with a thin platform-native GUI wrapper.

Jamie Turner from Dropbox gave a talk at a Rust meetup in 2017: https://air.mozilla.org/rust-meetup-may-2017/

Edit: at 30:05 in that video, he briefly talks about a forthcoming (as of 2017) "full redesign + rewrite of Dropbox's 'sync engine' in Rust." He claims it will use 10x less memory, and be 50x faster on key operations.

Thanks for the link, missed it

The also mention it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926851

strings /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Frameworks/libdropbox_watchdog.dylib | grep -i rust shows some hits:

  __ZN14rustc_demangle8demangle17h2ad719809986c0fcE
  _rust_begin_unwind
  /Users/vagrant/client-dropbox-python/dropbox-virtual-env-3985da1e510f-mac-x86_64-10.14/rust/lib/rustlib/x86_64-apple-darwin/lib/libcompiler_builtins-f10e664516557f83.rlib(compiler_builtins-f10e664516557f83.compiler_builtins.7wkmozn8-cgu.0.rcgu.o)
  ___rust_probestack
  /Users/travis/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-1ecc6299db9ec823/compiler_builtins-0.1.5/src/probestack.rs
  ___rust_alloc
  ___rust_dealloc
  ___rust_realloc
  ___rust_alloc_zeroed
  /Users/vagrant/src/client/rust_vendor/hyper-0.10.13/src/buffer.rs
  /Users/vagrant/src/client/rust_vendor/serde_json-1.0.33/src/read.rs
  ...

Looks like they use it fairly lightly though.

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