Case Study: Npm uses Rust for its CPU-bound bottlenecks [pdf]

Re:Case Study: Npm uses Rust for its CPU-bound bottlenecks [... by austincheney on Sunday March 03, 2019 @11:32AM (#19295237)

I guess I just don't see it. NPM is a massive infrastructure where one little piece was rewritten in Rust and then the Rust team wrote a promotional paper about it. The paper isn't bad, but it also isn't a technical white paper.

I don't see how any of this is critical of JavaScript, which isn't even really discussed in the paper and still runs the rest of the infrastructure. If anything the paper is more damning of C, C++, and Java but I still think damning is far too extreme to describe what the paper said.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Case Study: Npm uses Rust for its CPU-bound bottlenecks [... by johannes1234321 on Sunday March 03, 2019 @12:06PM (#19295449)

> If anything the paper is more damning of C, C++

I don't see it as damning on either of these. On C++ it says "we didn't want to learn it." Which is fine. Maybe after learning they would have decided different, or not. On Java they said "we didn't want to learn how to operate it" as they feared the complexity of an Java application server for a single small service, which they can create in a way which hooks into their monitoring infrastructure. No damning their either.

However their company's purpose is to push Javascript and they are saying "operating JavaScript is hard, doing this in Rust is easy" which directly goes against their business.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Case Study: Npm uses Rust for its CPU-bound bottlenecks [... by austincheney on Sunday March 03, 2019 @12:41PM (#19295655)

I think you and I read completely different papers. I didn’t see anything about not wanting to learn or motivations of easy.

[ Parent | on HN ]