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Comment by cbb330 | Hacker News Reader

How often do the domains of systems programming and cloud administration intersect?

I'm assuming that rust programs are primarily used in systems programming and that this SDK would be used for cloud administration but I could be wrong.

I see an obvious match with python and boto3 but not this.

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In a world where you rent computers by CPU time and RAM usage, enterprises that grow large enough find significant cost savings by implementing high-volume services in more resource-efficient ways.

Users in this space also appreciate Rust's reliability properties. They say things like "It's never my Rust services that set off my pager, and that makes me happy."

Systems programming is just the recommended domain.

Personally I think having a strong type system with an IDE that instantly tells you if the data is the right shape is very valuable when interacting with network interfaces.

In Python you either send the request at runtime and see what the server responds with, or you read the docs, both of which are at least 10x slower than an IDE telling you nearly instantly.

Rust's type system can represent null and polymorphic types quite well, both of which are quite common in JSON-like network interfaces.

Macros work well for code generation that is often used to convert a network api spec into code.

Of course you can do types and macros in Python, but neither are primary features of the language so are not as well supported.

Boto typing stubs are changing this. Prior to that I'd of agreed 100%.

There's a lot or growing number of people who don't use Rust for "systems programming" per se.

People are writing web services or data products that would need to interact with cloud services. Object stores, SQL interaction, lambda/serverless, etc.

I'd think that people using this SDK for cloud administration would be in the minority, but it's just a hunch.

I'll give it a go, as long as the documentation is good.

I worry about that.

> How often do the domains of systems programming and cloud administration intersect?

I can see Rust being attractive for high-traffic network apps, based on the idea of requests-per-second not being amortized over GC pauses.

Anyone in this space would already have been using apache or nginx, which are in C or C++. How mature are rust's HTTP implementations?

https://linkerd.io/

Seems relevant.

Used by real companies at scale. The primary maintainer of the largest one even works at Amazon, though I don’t know if they use it in a network-facing way there. You can also do what folks do in other languages too, and put nginx out in front, if you prefer.

Having a mostly statically linked executable handle this rather than some bastard child of virtual environments and docker images is a dream come true.

Shoutout to the Tools teams which develops cross, it's really amazing, did a project ago and had some problems to compiling static with rustls (OpenSSL really bugs with me, who knows why) do I tried Cross and felt in love, just works

If you have problems using musl with some libs, give it a go, you gonna love it ;P

https://github.com/rust-embedded/cross

Edit: my dumbass english failed me, sorry.

Our product is built on AWS and is primarily written in Rust. If you're renting compute you'd better make the most of it, cause that's just money down the drain.

> I'm assuming that rust programs are primarily used in systems programming and that this SDK would be used for cloud administration but I could be wrong.

I often see Rust used for microservices (where Go is often used), for which access to AWS is very nice to have.

I know quite a few cloud administrators that are systems programmers. They love to work in languages that they can lean on their compiler and not runtime to find a lot of mistakes.

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