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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

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RcouF1uZ4gsC

I think the big thing is not that they were faster with Rust, but that they were also much safer.

From the blog post:

> Since Pingora's inception we’ve served a few hundred trillion requests and have yet to crash due to our service code.

That would be hard to achieve in C or C++.

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This sort of atavistic, ritual distrust of C (and C++) code is tiresome. Keep in mind that most likely all of the highest-traffic sites in the world are using C (or C++) systems to process their own trillions of transactions. I recently worked on such code (written in C), and it has also had zero errors over more than two years of continuous operation; and I do mean zero.

How many people worked on that code for how long to get it down to that level of error rate? Nobody is saying that C/C++ programs cannot be safe, only that it's more expensive and challenging to do so. Given the regular cadence of the largest tech companies in the world[1] shipping updates for memory safety issues I think there's a enough evidence supporting that position that it can't be dismissed as “atavistic”.

1. https://twitter.com/lazyfishbarrel

I have a table saw in my garage. It was my dad's that he gave to me when he moved. He bought it in the 70s. It's a fantastic saw - it cuts through pretty much anything. I grew up learning how to use a table saw with this exact piece of equipment. I never had a mishap, nor did my dad - that saw has never tasted human. I was taught to be careful with it, and respect the fact that humans are easier for it to dismember than a board.

It sits in a corner collecting dust and reminding me of the fun times my pops and I built stuff together because I bought a saw-stop. Sure i could probably spend the next 2-3 decades safely using the old saw and never hurting myself - but why? I like my hands and fingers attached to my body - being careful will probably keep them in that state, but when I have stronger guarantees from the new gear, I'll use that instead - and recommend the same to others.

Also, if you look at the stats for saw-related accidents, 70% of them are impossible when the safety mode of the new gear is enabled (which is the default way of handling it). This is even in professional companies that keep using the old gear due to inertia and invested a lot in "safe handling practices" for it.

Google most likely serve an order of magnitude of that and use C++. Rust is definitly a good fit but saying that other language can't do it where there are much larger service than cloudflare out there not using Rust...

Netflix is serving TB/sec using Nginx just fine.

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