A Tale of Three Codebases

blog.convex.dev

24 pointsjamwt4 comments

> While Rust does have a steep learning curve, nearly all the engineers we've worked with have experienced a productivity increase from using it. Freedom from type errors and data races is a huge productivity boost on complex projects.

Compared to Go?

Obviously depends on the kind of projects you're working on but in our experience we've been more productive in Rust compared to when we've built large systems in Python, Go, C and C++.

This is with regards to long-term productivity however. Generally it shows up in building things that work right the first time around, being able to refactor confidently, etc. Personally I still find myself faster in Go or Python if I have to throw a short-term project together very quickly but other members of the team still profess to being more efficient with Rust for these types of projects too.

As one of those other team members of James's, I'd profess that if it's literally less than 50 lines of code, I'm probably still faster in Python (22 years of programming python). Otherwise, once things hit 200-300 lines, I can now sort of feel the overhead of more fragile refactors and longer debug cycles kicking in. So, for me personally, it doesn't take much of a codebase before the tipping point.

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