Cloudflare Outlines How They Rewrote An Nginx C Module In Rust

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Cloudflare Outlines How They Rewrote An Nginx C Module In Rust

While Cloudflare is in the process of replacing Nginx with their in-house, Rust-written alternative, the Cloudflare infrastructure is vast and has many different services at play. For one of the areas they are still currently relying on Nginx, this week they published a blog post outlining how they rewrote an Nginx module in the C programming language to instead make use of Rust...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cloudflare-Rewrite-Nginx-C-Rust

[all3f0r1]

I'm a bit surprised you covered such a "news", Michael. Blog posts about success stories of components rewritten in Rust are plenty. Why this one, specifically?

(We already know Rust is a superior language to its similarly fast predecessor).

[Ironmask]

I'm a bit surprised you covered such a "news", Michael. Blog posts about success stories of components rewritten in Rust are plenty. Why this one, specifically?

(We already know Rust is a superior language to its similarly fast predecessor).

Less news about them doing it in general, more news about announcing the blog post where they outline how they did it.
It's pretty interesting, especially that part about how they turn email addresses into JavaScript so bots can't parse them.

[Vistaus]

Less news about them doing it in general, more news about announcing the blog post where they outline how they did it.
It's pretty interesting, especially that part about how they turn email addresses into JavaScript so bots can't parse them.

That too, plus Cloudflare is a huge company, so that also makes it very newsworthy.

[hojjat]

I feel like Michael keeps publishing anything Rust related because it creates so much interaction! Look at any post about Rust in the kernel, or Rust in Mesa, or Rust anything! There are a few people that always show up and start ranting. It's fun!

[sinepgib]

That too, plus Cloudflare is a huge company, so that also makes it very newsworthy.

And nginx being a high profile, established product. It's not the same to write a success story of a small product written from scratch than it is to showcase you can have something existent and improve it (depending on who you ask, of course) with Rust. nginx necessarily has more deployments than most projects, at least in the web, so it is newsworthy (assuming they aim for upstream, I haven't read the article yet).

[sinepgib]

I feel like Michael keeps publishing anything Rust related because it creates so much interaction! Look at any post about Rust in the kernel, or Rust in Mesa, or Rust anything! There are a few people that always show up and start ranting. It's fun!

Yes, it's also this. Clicks and comments are good for both ad income and SEO. But at least in this case I think it's newsworthy :P

[Barnacle]

(We already know Rust is a superior language to its similarly fast predecessor).

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If it is so superior, there ought to be some tangible evidence of that (past marketing hype) given 8 years since first stable release.

There are a small number of well established companies that use Rust for a tiny percentage of their code. There are a tiny number of Rust-based start ups, none significant. There are a bunch of open source projects along the lines of "Rustman: It's Pacman.. But in Rust!" that nobody cares about. The major open source project with significant amounts of Rust in it is Firefox, but it was literally better, faster and more featureful before Rust, and it's still mostly written in an "inferior" language. Which just leaves the evidence-free claim of "but, but... these applications are really, really fast and secure!", as RedoxOS is permanently incapable of fixing some inherent security flaws because Rust lacks the "unsafe" features to make the OS kernel "safe".

At some point, this "massive superiority" ought to manifest itself as an actual advantage, but Rust is the Wayland of programming languages.... Just give it one more decade, and it's going to be amazing.

[Ironmask]

Given the amount of effort they seem to have to go through to make Rust modules for Nginx (to the point where they wanted to simply fork it to make it easier), I wonder why they don't just switch to hyper or another Rust server. I'm pretty sure they're faster anyway, or at least certainly at a comparable performance. I know they would have to rewrite all their other existing modules and Lua scripts, but it kind of sounds worth it if their goal is to avoid another Cloudbleed.

I feel like Michael keeps publishing anything Rust related because it creates so much interaction! Look at any post about Rust in the kernel, or Rust in Mesa, or Rust anything! There are a few people that always show up and start ranting. It's fun!

Michael just posts about anything, and Rust has been gaining a lot of buzz since so much infrastructure is incorporating it (practically everything, really). It's just a matter of proportions and statistics. Didn't some Linux news subreddit even ban Phoronix articles for "spam"? Everything is news to Michael.

[bug77]

I'm a bit surprised you covered such a "news", Michael. Blog posts about success stories of components rewritten in Rust are plenty. Why this one, specifically?

(We already know Rust is a superior language to its similarly fast predecessor).

If nothing else, this particular post touches on real world benefits other than "it's memory safe". Because memory safe is really just the means to an end (or many).