AWS hires Rust compiler team co-lead Felix Klock
- Reference: 1606456869
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/27/aws_hires_rust_compiler_team/
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A Tuesday [1]post from the AWS open source team expressing its ardour for Rust outlined several ways the cloud colossus has embraced the language.
AWS's Matt Assay wrote that the company "increasingly builds critical infrastructure like the Firecracker VMM using Rust because its out-of-the-box features reduce the time and effort needed to reach Amazon's high security bar, while still delivering runtime performance similar to C and C++."
AWS likes Rust so much it sponsored the project and said the company has even "started hiring Rust and Tokio committers to ensure they'd have the time and resources necessary to further improve Rust."
Firefox maker Mozilla axes a quarter of its workforce, blames coronavirus, vows to 'develop new revenue streams' [2]READ MORE
Among those AWS says it has hired are Sean McArthur, who is named-checked in the "Thank-you" list of the Rust 1.0 release, plus prominent developers Lucio Franco and Jon Gjengset.
The post also revealed that AWS recently hired Klock, currently the project's compiler co-lead.
Klock previously worked at Mozilla and his LinkedIn profile says he finished there in August 2020 – when the organisation made a big round of job cuts – before arriving at AWS in October.
"Let's be clear: We understand that we are net beneficiaries of the exceptional work that others have done to make Rust thrive," Assay writes. "AWS didn't start Rust or make it the success that it is today, but we'd like to contribute to its future success. We are convinced that investing in the wider Rust ecosystem helps our customers and those who may never become our customers. That's OK. That's how open source is supposed to work."
AWS senior software engineering manager Shane Miller chimed in, saying: "We're not just hiring a couple of folks for Tokio and the Rust compiler.
"Rust is a critical component of our long-term strategy, and we're investing to deliver Rust engineering at Amazon scale. That includes developer tools, infrastructure components, interoperability, and verification." ®
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[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/why-aws-loves-rust-and-how-wed-like-to-help/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/11/mozilla_staff_layoffs_products_revenue/
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Nice move
Rust IS harder to master than some other languages but in my experience this has never been a problem. Learning new concepts, if they're sound and lead to safer and/or more efficient software, is never wasted time. IMHO.
As to last drops of performance I wholeheartedly agree. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." If anything, this Donald Knuth quote should be hanging above every programmer's desk.
And garbage collection? I agree as well. Todays's GCs have become "good enough" for almost everything not requiring real time performance. And very few processes need real "real time".
Re: Nice move
There is a website called Are We Web Yet? (https://www.arewewebyet.org/) that shows the state of Rust as regards to web technologies, databases etc. and it's pretty complete.
While it is obviously not the right choice for many applications that might otherwise choose C#/Java, I think it is a very good choice for those that are constrained by speed, memory or need to scale up. For example I think Rust is going to be very popular in IIOT devices as well as part of cloud compute stacks that need to be reliable and super fast.
Amazon got lucky that Mozilla gave up
Translation: "We used a nifty new language and had to hire an expert when the organisation sponsoring it threw in the towel. Good thing they didn't keep at it but take the language in some direction inappropriate for our uses, because then Klock might not be available to us."
I'll reserve judgement on the language itself, other than to say, whatever the merits of the borrow-checker concept, it seems to be almost as much like line noise as perl or TECO. At some point I'll learn enough Rust to form an opinion, but I'm afraid it's behind Erlang in the queue.
I'd prefer if the next language did not hail from the Anglosphere - every language from there (B, BCPL, Bliss, C, C++, perl, go, Swift) has lacked taste. Yet a succession of elegant things from other countries (Pascal, Modula-2, Simula-67, Ada, and probably if I knew them Erlang and OCaml) have sunk almost without trace. I quite like Python - guess what, it's originally from the Netherlands.
It's almost as though dominance of languages has little to do with their merits and more to do with what big American companies like.
Re: Amazon got lucky that Mozilla gave up
> every language from there (...) has lacked taste
Never drink hot tea while sitting in front of a computer screen.
And whether the words "elegant" and "Ada" and "Python" should go into one sentence is surely debatable.
Also, Pascal, in its day, was quite a success... it certainly didn't sink almost w/o trace.
Re: Amazon got lucky that Mozilla gave up
Ada might be too verbose for your taste, but it is consistent.
Pascal took a lot longer to sink than the others, but there's not a lot of it floating around now. (Back in the 80s, I built several products with it that had thousands of users.) It's true it left a trace in Swift's and golang's declaration syntax. I can't think off-hand of any other way it influenced modern languages; everything else came from Algol-60.
Python is, I would argue, somewhat elegant within its original intended purposes. It's flawed, e.g. the "__init__" muck, but then I did say I "quite liked" it rather than listing it with the others.
And I don't know how I managed to leave out Rust's fellow alumnus Javascript, which, like a lot of people, I despise. Fool me once,...
Re: Amazon got lucky that Mozilla gave up
At some point I'll learn enough Erlang to form an opinion, but I'm afraid it's behind Brainfuck in the queue.
Nice move
I believe Rust will eventually supplant C and C++ as the language of choice for performance oriented programming. This includes operating systems, device drivers, games and tooling.
I do not believe (and hope) that Rust will be used in line of business applications as it is simply much harder to master than C# or Java. Some companies will always claim they need that last drop of performance, but believe me, in most cases they don't.
Working with Rust I've come to appreciate the wisdom of including garbage collection in Java and C#. Manual memory management is simply something humans aren't good at and is best left to the computer.