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Comment by jimsimmons | Hacker News Reader

Slight tangent: The video has a guy describing the tool and he includes the fact that it’s written in rust when introducing it. I’ve always found this sort of name dropping in rust projects/devs baffling. Is there anything that I’m expected to infer from it? Is it that it’s backend is memory safe? I can’t think of anything else. Now it may very well be very memory safe but why include that highly specific detail when talking about a very high level thing that is the UX of search. What if it was written in Haskell or C#? Would it still be brought up? It’s almost as if being written in rust is a feature in itself these days. As a technical guy I can’t help but take the person less seriously, especially when it’s as unwarranted as this.

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Hey! That was me in the video.

Not ashamed to be a Rust evangelist! The reason I mentioned Rust is because we spent a lot of time making the experience really fast - which is super important for a product like this. I really think getting the performance we have would have been enormously more difficult in any other language.

Fellow Rustacean here. Is the search engine secret sauce or something that could perhaps be open sourced? I'd like better tooling for searching private code bases. Also, would you consider writing about optimization techniques you used?

We are looking into open sourcing some libraries that we've developed for search. And we're going to write a blog post with way more technical details soon!

I agree with you, but I just wanted to point out the following:

In general, Rust, C, and C++ are going to be faster than languages like Ruby*. He brought up Rust while discussing the performance of the new tool. Although performance is more complex than language choice, etc., saying it's written in Rust gives the viewer an approximate lower bound as to how fast the tool should be.

*: (GH started as a Ruby shop, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what the original tool was written in).

He’s talking about text search and the post thanks @BurntSushi. That means they’re using the fastest text search tool out there - ripgrep. I won’t mention what it’s written in, because that clearly upsets you.

Benchmark - ripgrep is faster than {grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift} (2016) - https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/

It's obviously personal preference but as a technical guy I am always curious what lang. a project is using.

Go had this issue for a while, too, it's finally started to calm down as Go hits a mainstream that is (imo) much farther than Rust is currently. I think much is just people trying to add validity to Rust for large-scale production workloads, in the same way that Kubernetes was "a compute scheduler written in Go" or Terraform was "infrastructure as code written in Go" (maybe those are bad examples, but I know I've seen the "X written in Go" thing going on).

This is exactly how I see it as well. Rust used to be an obscure language with a compiler written in OCAML. If something was written in D or zig, it’s noteworthy so you mention it. I think rust has come into the mainstream enough that we can drop the “written in rust” line imo.

I think depending on where the audience is coming from—for example people who primarily work in scripting/interpreted languages—Rust can also be a positive signal for performance.

It really is like the joke about vegans. So tiring.

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