Ask HN: Why is rust so popular among Crypto? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is rust so popular among Crypto?

12 pointszamio9 comments

There seems to be a high concentration of rust jobs in Crypto. Why is rust so popular in Crypto? Any insights would be appreciated. Additionally, how does one go about finding Rust jobs not concentrated in crypto?

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In crypto, where a bug can potentially be the downfall of your whole business, the balance between shipping quickly and shipping bug-free code is different than normal software development. Fields that have strict requirements for security would probably be good candidates for Rust jobs, but I don't know if Rust is stable enough to be attractive yet, and potential for supply-chain attacks might be a drawback. Low-level system code and embedded might be good targets, but these are probably even more conservative with their toolchain.

It’s an incredibly safe language with a very expressive type system, which is good for handling money.

Also, since crypto stuff is relatively new it’s easier to adopt a newer language like Rust. It has been the most loved language on SO survey for some years.

Also, scammers like to clothe themselves in the guide of "just the facts man"

It's a combination of the cosmwasm (Rust->WebAssembly:https://github.com/CosmWasm/cosmwasm) library being popular for writing smart contracts, and the Rust specifically being chosen for its great type safety and error tooling, which can help people writing smart contracts to better guarantee the behavior of their smart contracts ahead of time. This is important because once it's deployed it's essentially a bounty program with a direct payment mechanism for the entire value of the funds that the smart contract can manage.

hyper.rs too. Introduced to it via nft. And it's quite performant. Dreaming of a grand re-arch. All golang services in rust now ;)

I think it mostly comes down to the fact that both are seen by many as new, exciting pieces of tech. Plus the fact that a “systems language” is well suited to crypto in the first place.

The kind of person who is going to found or join a crypto startup are also very likely to appreciate and use that.

Can't help for the 2nd one. For the first one, I assume it's a mix of rust is amazing, a few initial libraries made it easy to set up crypto projects and it has grown into an ecosystem, for low latency bit banging like you might need to do trading on a Blockchain Rust will be much nicer to work with than C++ and finally, cryptocurrency needs to project as much legitimacy and safety as possible to keep up the charade, so on top of "military grade Crypto" why not throw "memory safe language, fearless itération, borrow checker makes complexity safe" etc. onto the pile and hope people assume because one part can be technically safe, everything will be

There also seems to be a high concentration of Svelte jobs in Crypto.

Perhaps there is no correlation; it's just because there are relatively more job openings in Crypto. I think even major companies are chasing fads like NFT's.

On a related note, some maps can make it seem like X is concentrated to certain areas, but they just end up being maps of the overall population density.

Perhaps it is popular because Rust is suitable for blockchains?

I don't see any problem with that.

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