Cloudflare Ditches Nginx For In-House, Rust-Written Pingora

[Anux]

Did... anyone here actually read the original post? Because it's very clear that the performance improvements have nothing to do with Rust, at all.

THX, that wasn't clear from Michaels article. Although I wouldn't say that it has nothing to do with Rust.

Figured I'd add: Rewriting in Rust at least gives the benefit of a certain amount of memory safety which takes several failure cases off the table, so that is a net positive even if performance had turned out to have been similar in either case.

Yes, especially in this case (massive multi threading) Rusts enables you to do fearless concurrency. You don't have to care about race conditions and strange memory bugs that would be nearly impossible to fix. And that in turn helps writing performant code.

[luno]

Did... anyone here actually read the original post? Because it's very clear that the performance improvements have nothing to do with Rust, at all.

writing same with C/C++ would have given ton of memory bugs with performance, so language do matter

[cj.wijtmans]

writing same with C/C++ would have given ton of memory bugs with performance, so language do matter

Did you read some propaganda from the 2000s bro?

[Quackdoc]

Did you read some propaganda from the 2000s bro?

well pretty much every big name player seems to be sharing that propaganda

[cynic]

Not bad, 70 % less resources is a real deal in this business. They probably got back the development money for this project after one month.

Let's see what our dear Rust haters come up with this time.

I like Rust (as I like other languages) but I can't stand Rust fanboys that post such comment as your to every news.
So, somebody is using Rust to do something? Nice! but there's no need to play victim pretending that Rust is the best language ever but everybody hates it.

[aksdb]

Sure Rust/Go/C++/whatever you like best can provide some benefits as a language but the big performance meat is from the design changes and how well it adjust to your hardware / use case. Hell they can prolly had used vala and still be faster than nginx for their specific use case.

Well, to some (big) extent, yes. However a few design decisions are influenced by what the language and framework offers. If all I have is OS-level-threads I can't simply design the system in a blocking manner and then try to spawn 100.000 threads to handle connections and other I/O bound stuff. If I have greenthreads/coroutines I could design the system in that way, though, because there I can have that many "threads" without much issues. Of course I can model my problem differently to fit into less threads, but then the properties of the language/framework directly influenced my design decision.

[curfew]

It's a common misconception that rewriting things in Rust makes them faster because Rust is a fast language. Rewriting them in Rust makes them faster because it makes you, the developer, willing to choose an architecture or set of optimizations that you wouldn't want to debug and maintain in C or C++.

Hell, Node.JS can be faster than Rust if you hammer away at optimizing it and overlook some tunable (eg. a buffer size) that it gives a more favourable default to than Rust. That's why NPM rewrote one of their components and found it was about the same speed but kept the Rust rewrite because it wasn't a constant fight to keep it from throwing exceptions in weird edge cases that became common at the scale they were running it.

At first you seem to portray Rust as something that is only beneficial with considerable added burden of maintenance, but then offer a real-world example of the complete opposite. NPM folks chose Rust because it made their life easier despite not providing more performance.

[lowflyer]

Software developers are usually very quite and calm folks, almost introverts. But there is the occasional explosion of an argument among themselves about topics that nobody outside that community is capable to understand. In these cases they fight with a noise and vengeance only known from religious fundamentalists.

• in the beginning there were the numbers and numbers only. The numbers were called "hex code"
• the assembly languages were created because they couldn't stand the obnoxious hex code
• to bring peace among the various assembly languages, C was invented as a "better assembly language"
• instead of fighting against object orientation some folks decided to embrace it, so C++ was created which drew the hate of the C camp because the name was too similar
• Java was created because they hated pointers
• C# was created because they hated Java
• Rust was created because the C camp wanted to have the C++ features without having to admit to actually using C++

Beyond the staggering performance wins, Pingora is also deemed safer thanks in large part to the use of Rust.

Let's see what our dear Rust haters come up with this time.

writing same with C/C++ would have given ton of memory bugs with performance, so language do matter

Comments like the above actually make me want to re-write that stuff in C++ or C or even assembly

[ssokolow]

At first you seem to portray Rust as something that is only beneficial with considerable added burden of maintenance, but then offer a real-world example of the complete opposite. NPM folks chose Rust because it made their life easier despite not providing more performance.

That wasn't my intention. The first paragraph is supposed to be read as " Rust may be a better solution because it brings more maintainability". (and the second paragraph adds "...regardless of whether that improved maintainability translates into greater speed".)

[piotrj3]

[*]Rust was created because the C camp wanted to have the C++ features without having to admit to actually using C++

That is not reason Rust was created. In fact Rust doesn't have many things C++ does and it is intentionally not existing there (like exceptions). It is simply C/C++ that is memory safe that does every possible check on compile time.