Hi, author of the post here. I'll also be talking about this issue in a little more detail at an online Rust Warsaw meetup tomorrow, feel free to join, especially if you're up for a live discussion later: https://www.meetup.com/Rust-Warsaw/events/282879405/
Can you please shed some light on rust's adoption at scylla given the cumulative team expertise in Cpp and unsafe programming like thread-per-core architectures.
In my experience so far, highly proficient Cpp programmers tend to find rust constraints overly restrictive, because they kind of internalise the borrow checker and are comfortable enough to bend the rules sometimes.
how receptive are fellow scyllians (is that the term?) to rust? how much scope is there for future projects to be in Rust over Cpp?
> In my experience so far, highly proficient Cpp programmers tend to find rust constraints overly restrictive
For me it's the exact opposite - I find Rust righteously restrictive exactly in places I wish the C++ compiler would complain. For instance, the fact that variables are legal to use after move is an obvious C++ footgun - you almost never want it to actually happen in your code. And then, if one really knows better, Rust has `unsafe`, which I actually never used yet except for providing C/C++ bindings to link a Rust project with Scylla.
So, to sum up, I think that Rust has much better defaults (e.g. move the value by default, everything is const by default, etc.), but still lets you bend the rules explicitly, while in C++ the rules are already slightly bent for you, just in case you need it, which is instead a common source of bugs.
And the adoption of Rust is going great at ScyllaDB. More of it is hopefully coming soon, including a rewrite of user-defined functions support in Rust, which would allow us to fully utilize wasmtime (a very neat Rust project) as the WebAssembly engine.
Mmm. The world we actually have suggests that this comfort is dangerous.
Robert Browning was a famous poet. Certainly competent enough with English that you'd assume he knows what he's doing and can bend the rules. So, Dictionary makers were a little confused by the passage in Pippa Passes, "Then owls and bats / Cowls and twats / Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods / Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry". Why did Browning use the word "Twat" in this context? Turns out that he just had just assumed it was a word meaning a hat nuns wear...
Oops. Of course this goof just means a high school literature teacher covering Browning has to decide whether to skip this part of Pippa Passes maybe "for time" and hope nobody asks about it, or explain to the class that even the best of us screw up sometimes. In Computer Software our mistakes are often not treated so kindly.
