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Comment by PreInternet01 | Hacker News Reader

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They wrote their own BMC and various other bits and pieces in Rust. That's an extremely tiny part of the whole picture.

It’s significantly more than that, but it’s also true that we include stuff in other languages where appropriate. CockroachDB is in Go, and illumos is in C, as two examples. But almost all new code we write is in Rust. That is the stuff you’re talking about, but also like, our control plane.

Oh and we write a lot of Typescript too.

I think it's hard to call it a reason. It is a tool which fits in with the philosophy of the company in terms of how to achieve it's goals, but I think it would still exist if rust didn't. I would describe the goal as making a hyperscaling system that can be sold as a product, the philosophy of how to make this is an aggressive focus on integration, openness, and quality, and that rust is a language that works well with the last two of those goals.

It's also not really a case of "rewriting in Rust" anyway, it's more just "writing it in Rust" since most of the stuff the Oxide team has built is greenfield work.

We also sell computers... :)

OSS Rust in Rack trenchcoat.

That's an interesting take. What's your reasoning? Whats your evidence?

Pretty much everything Oxide publishes on github is either in rust or it's an sdk to service in rust. Well and web panel isn'tin rust, so negative points for that, true evangelists would have used WASM.

But Oxide reason to exist is to keep memory of cool racks from Sun running Solaris alive forever.

The raison d'être of Oxide isn't Rust, it's continuing to pretend that the bloated corpse of Solaris still has some signs of life.

https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master/ looks alive to me.

(And for that matter, Oracle's proprietary Solaris seems better maintained than I ever expected, though in this context I think the open source fork is the relevant thing to look at.)

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