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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

"How we avoided rewriting in Rust" feels like clickbait given that the answer is "our problems were algorithmic, not language-specific"

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Memory issues are amplified a bit by garbage collection though, in that every pointer must be stored twice, and collection will take time and evict things from cpu cache etc.

If you were struggling with this, turning to Rust might be a thing people would try, even if it wasn't fixing the first order problems, and only addressing the 2nd order ones.

The whole post is about how Rust turned out not to be the answer to exactly this problem.

A bit yea, but it is somewhat telling that their first instinct was to find a GC "knob" and twist it around until they could go back to ignoring their basic architecture.

Go and Rust are great in that they let you write code at good speed, although, I think this just highlights the well known problems of over optimizing a single metric.

I would call this a language issue as you need to understand the various abstractions and how they interact which is endemic to almost all languages, ideally a language would type system to express resource usage

I assume it's tongue-in-cheek; because "rewrite in Rust to improve performance" is such a meme, the headline is subtly calling attention to the fact that this is rarely good advice and certainly not the first lever an engineer should reach for upon running into a performance problem.

It's not the first lever an engineer should reach for regardless of the languages involved. Calling out Rust specifically feels like a bit of a cheap shot

To be fair, that is now the common "I rewrote X in Y" theme, which followed upon the Y ∈ { Ruby, Clojure, Scala, Kotlin,.... } from previous years.

And Go too! It's always fun to see posts from around 2014/2015 complaining about how every submission to Hacker News is now "I wrote X in Go", while now Go is the boring stuff and Rust is the hot new thing. I wonder what will be the next Rust though.

BPF-verified C.

Naw, BPF-verified BF. Or someone will make "BrainFuck Plus" so we can get BPF-verified BFP.

Some GC based language with dependent types.

Nim is on the way up in HN posts...

Nim has dependent types?

Write it in Malbolge? Slightly less silly, modern C++ and modern Python are evergreen.

They are, but they also are too big, so at some point people will want to replace them with something simpler/smaller. Go has been used for this for some projects in C++ and Python.

It's a shot at the "just rewrite it in Rust" meme, not at Rust or the Rust community.

> subtly calling attention

That's generous. I'd call it clickbait.

Well consider all the projects titled “blah blah blah… written in Rust”

Who gives a shit what it’s written in—what does it do?

People who is interested in rust maybe want to see how it was used.

The author could have just kept "Taming Go's Memory Usage".

Maybe they never considered rewriting in rust. The pros and cons looks like just some random arguments to add rust to the title.

> The author could have just kept "Taming Go's Memory Usage".

It’s their article. They can choose to write it however they want. You may find this type of humor distasteful, fine, write your articles that way.

As a user of both rust and golang, I chuckled at the headline and then forgot about it.

TFA doesn’t argue that one is better than the other? Maybe you’re commenting on unrelated “click bait shit”?

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