The author seems very anxious because Rust is getting traction and they don't like Rust. They're afraid that one day Rust will become a "monoculture" and everything will be written in it.
I like Rust, but I consider this very, very unlikely.
Rust has actually brought more choice to the programming language scenario. If we're talking about monoculture, let's talk about C/C++. For decades this was the only viable option for systems programming. All new languages were focusing on a higher lever. Languages for lower level stuff were rare. There was D, but it never got enough traction.
Then Rust appeared and there is finally an alternative. And not only that, I because of that, other language designers decided to create new systems languages, and now we have Zig, and Odin, and Vale, etc.
So if anything, Rust is helping in breaking the monoculture, not creating it. C and C++ are not going away, but now we have alternatives.
And I think it's important to acknowledge that even if you don't like a language, if you see a bunch of software being written in such language, it's because the language is useful. I don't like C++ but I admit it's damn useful! People are writing interesting software in Rust because they find it useful.
Rust is challenging people because it declares several long-inadequate things about C/C++ to be inadequate (security issues, dependency management), and provides alternatives which show that it doesn't have to be like that.
The rewrites will inevitably be long and painful. Rewrites always are. But the onus on anti-Rust people is now to demonstrate a better language to rewrite in first, rather than just sitting in the status quo waiting for the steamroller driven by a crab to very slowly run them over.
D is interesting but seems to be a solo project, I'm not sure why it's not had traction. Maybe it's not different _enough_.
This is not meant as a critique of you, but your comment includes a hint of what bothers me with some Rust evangelists. I would call it "slightly entitled over-optimism".
I have a C++ service running in production. It's been in production for 10-ish years with minimal updates. It'll probably keep running just fine for the next 10 years.
With that in mind, "the onus on anti-Rust people is now to demonstrate a better language to rewrite in first, rather than just sitting in the status quo waiting for the steamroller driven by a crab to very slowly run them over." just doesn't make much sense to me. If the status quo is fine, there's no "onus", there's no difficult decision to be made, there just isn't any rewrite. The anti-Rust people will probably be fine by doing ... nothing.
Is it on a network (or other) security boundary, exposed to attack from the Internet?
Is it deployed on millions of machines worldwide?
_Those_ are the primary targets for replacement, because the networked environment is a very hostile place, and people are fed up with the consequences of that. Regular announcements of "sorry all your private data has been leaked lol". Constant upgrade treadmill to fix the latest CVEs.
(the poster child for this was really Shockwave Flash, later owned by Adobe, which had so many RCE exploits everyone united behind Apple killing it off. Even if this meant obsoleting a whole era of media and games which relied on it. That wasn't rewritten, it was just killed.)
I'd guess most services where performance matters are in the background. And this particular C++ service is only accessible over internal LAN, to be used by other back-end servers.
I agree with you that if ha-proxy and nginx didn't exist yet, they would be prime candidates for being implemented in Rust. But now that they already exist and reliably work, I'm not sure there is enough pain for them to get replaced anytime soon. BTW the last ha-proxy CVE was them differing from the HTTP spec and accepting the # character in additional URL components, which is something that probably no compiler could have flagged.
3. https://github.com/cloudflare/pingora says "Pingora keeps a rolling MSRV (minimum supported Rust version) policy of 6 months." so for anyone who dislikes the "constant upgrade treadmill", this won't help much.
So my summary would be that Pingora is a great Rust library which one day might be used for replacing nginx and/or ha-proxy.
But the main advantages of Pingora - which are the reason why CloudFlare is using it now - have nothing to do with Rust. Obviously, a software architecture designed in 2022 can take advantage of modern hardware in a way that an architecture from 2004 cannot. (Yes, nginx is that old). Intel's TBB library brought "work-stealing" to C++ around 10 years ago. The other big improvement in Pingora is moving from multi-process to multi-threading pools. Again, C++ had thread pools for years.
So Pingora is probably great and it's written in Rust. But the business benefits that it brings aren't coming from Rust. They are coming from the fact that it's a modern architecture.
> Think of Pingora as an engine that can power a car while you have to build the car yourself. Nginx is a complete car you can drive. River is a faster, safer, and an easily customizable car.
The title is being pedantic for effect. It doesn't say what you say it's saying.
This is an issue opened by someone on an open source repository. They aren't talking about how Cloudflare itself uses it, but about how they want to use it.
> so for anyone who dislikes the "constant upgrade treadmill", this won't help much.
Similar to above, this is moving the goalposts. Sure, that might be true, but it's unrelated to the original topic.
> But the main advantages of Pingora - which are the reason why CloudFlare is using it now - have nothing to do with Rust.
> We chose Rust as the language of the project because it can do what C can do in a memory safe way without compromising performance.
Cloudflare has been a vocal proponent of Rust for years now. Many years ago, they suffered a very serious bug, CloudBleed, that Rust would have prevented. And so they've been using Rust instead of C and C++ for a long time.
They of course would also very much agree that the architecture matters, but that doesn't mean that the implementation language doesn't matter either. If they chose to implement Pingora in, say, Ruby, that wouldn't have accomplished their goals.
I don't think anyone believes there will be no C++ codebases in the future - that's crazy talk. What could happen in a decade or two is that there'll be no _new_ C++ codebases. Popular languages are retired to legacy status from time to time, and C++ is completely outclassed by Rust.
Since C++ still evolves and changes, I guess greenfield C++ projects in the future can limit themselves to a subset of the newer improved language thereby C++ will continue living by that way as well.
The C++ community is talking about evolving in the following ways in this space:
1. contracts
2. profiles
3. successor languages
4. borrow checking
The idea of a "subset of the language" is one that's often talked about, but there seems to be an explicit rejection of the idea of a subset, at least by several important committee members. It's not clear to me why this is the case.
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The committee members have clear interest to keep things as they are. However, from a practical perspective I suspect that “subset lang” will happen. One just needs a linter or compiler flags to do that.
The thing is, there's a difference between a true subset and "some flags that reject certain things." Because that creates a number of different sets that may relate to each other in a variety of ways, some subsets, some overlapping.
But beyond the specific definitions here, "profiles" is that sort of approach, so something like it will happen, probably. It seems to have a lot of support.
"Subset language" is already an option. The developer can choose a safe(r) subset of C++ to constrain themselves to. Many (most?) C++ shops already do this, and go to varying lengths to enforce that only their blessed subset is used. We don't really need a committee to create a new "subset language" to accomplish this.
C++ already passed that line with C++17 and newer iterations. Not only it evolves way faster starting with C++17, the modern code looks sufficiently different that it needs relearning some parts of C++ from start.
I've written my biggest project with C++11, and C++14 was just out back then. Now, I plan to reimplement that project (and improve it), again with C++, but I need to look at so-called "modern C++" to do it correctly and in a more future-proof way.
...and I'm glad I have to do that, because while I love (old school) C++, seeing it evolve makes me happy. Because systems evolve, software scale evolve, and most importantly hardware and ways to get maximum performance from it evolve.
There's no need to write old-school C++ anymore. All these features are developed for a reason, they shall be used.
Fluid dynamics codes are still being written in Fortran.
Notably, there are still improvements happening in the Fortran space, and there's been a bit of revival of sorts. There are still features in Fortran that make it nicer to write in than C++ (and while I'd hoped rust might be a good Fortran replacement, I feel rust has taken a different path, and remains no better than C++).
I would like to echo this sentiment. I like Rust, but I can't see a Rust monoculture.
From my experience, Rust is an absolute improvement in developer experience around so many corners. I'm looking forward to the future where Rust is well established and boring, and all its round edges have been solved, even if that means adopting another new and exciting language :)
IMO there was only a brief period of monoculture, and only if you consider C & C++ to be part of the same culture, which is a stretch. It started in the mid-80s when people stopped writing programs in Pascal and/or assembly, and stopped in the mid-90s when Java & Perl started to get used extensively.
> if you consider C & C++ to be part of the same culture, which is a stretch
That’s my main gripe with most pro-Rust comments of this kind, to be honest. There are a few ways to write C and a lot of ways to write C++, and most of the C is quite unlike most of the C++. (I’m not counting marginal cases like raw GObject or raw COM as C here, I think those count as basically separate languages.)
The problem is, the Rust I’ve read (and read about) is methodologically and stylistically a replacement for most of the C++, but not a lot of the C. I don’t dislike the theory behind Rust—I’ve written Haskell, I’ve written SML, I read the Tofte&Talpin regions paper and some of the subsequent research more than a decade ago. I do dislike when people ask me to switch or even try to, of all things, shame me into switching from C to what presents itself as a better C++, in largely the same way that I dislike attempts to switch to C++ that claim it’s the same thing as C. No it isn’t. And I largely tune out when I read “C/C++”, because it implies the author does not get it.
(I’m aware there are other people that do get it, some of whom work on other programming languages. They just don’t write posts proposing Rust replace C.)
I was talking about a monoculture specifically in the systems programming area. Java, Perl, PhP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, C#, Go, these got popular but they use garbage collection and have limitations for systems programming. C and C++ were the only options for a long while.
Systems programming is just a niche. A large niche, but just a niche. But between when Pascal & Assembly stopped being used widely and before Java started being used widely C & C++ were used for pretty much everything.
I like Rust, but I consider this very, very unlikely.
Rust has actually brought more choice to the programming language scenario. If we're talking about monoculture, let's talk about C/C++. For decades this was the only viable option for systems programming. All new languages were focusing on a higher lever. Languages for lower level stuff were rare. There was D, but it never got enough traction.
Then Rust appeared and there is finally an alternative. And not only that, I because of that, other language designers decided to create new systems languages, and now we have Zig, and Odin, and Vale, etc.
So if anything, Rust is helping in breaking the monoculture, not creating it. C and C++ are not going away, but now we have alternatives.
And I think it's important to acknowledge that even if you don't like a language, if you see a bunch of software being written in such language, it's because the language is useful. I don't like C++ but I admit it's damn useful! People are writing interesting software in Rust because they find it useful.