Re:Scylla – Real-Time Big Data Database
by nerpderp82 on Wednesday August 25, 2021 @03:20PM
(#28305731)
Not sure proves your point, but maybe doesn't disprove your point strongly enough. I am not qualified to argue from experience about how Rust is ideally suited in the ways you think it is not. But from everything I have seen, it can do a whole lot of what C++ is also good at. Rust safety is not all or nothing and a codebase could definitely prioritize ergonomics over correctness.
Two things that I saw in the last couple weeks that might start to sway you.
https://github.com/sslab-gatech/Rudra#readme
GhostCell: Separating Permissions from Data in Rust https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIbubw86p0M
Even unsafe Rust can be as ergonomic as C++. But that unsafety can be mediated, moderated and controlled.
It is common in recent database kernel architectures to implement an entire virtual memory system in user space. This enables some great throughput optimizations. Almost all of your runtime objects are instantiated on top of this and, importantly, entities outside your process/code can write into your address space -- an invisible implicit reference. As a side effect, there are few memory references in the way Rust understands it, those outside entities don't understand or respect the object model, and some aspects of ownership, mutability, and lifetime can only be resolved at runtime and with some interesting edge cases. The model is elegant and safe, it just doesn't provide a coherent graph of classic memory references that Rust can latch onto at compile-time for safety analysis.
All good wholesome fun.