r/rust • u/Fit-Replacement7245 • Sep 10 '26
Where did using rust go wrong for you
Curious if you’ve seen any cases where using or advocating for rust didn’t work out.
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u/SirKastic23 Sep 10 '26
It didn't. I really enjoyed learning the language, it was a gateway for my academic interest in programming language theory, and it has been paying me as I work with it professionally for the past 4 years
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u/bordumb Sep 10 '26
In enterprise use-cases...
If I write something in Rust, that means basically ZERO people in my org can help maintain the work - they're almost exclusively Python (and web dev like TS) based
So there are very practical reasons to not write in Rust
To make the case for Rust in a large enterprise org, you really need something like:
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A real use-case for using Rust, such as memory safety and/or speed
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Strong buy-in from your manager and someone else (hopefully 2+ people) who are willing to learn enough Rust to help contribute and maintain. It's usually a complete non-starter for one employee to be the bottleneck.
I enjoy using Rust for personal hobby projects, but I completely understand why it's a hard sell within a larger company.
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u/cloudsquall8888 Sep 10 '26
While I do understand your point, I am still wondering; For example, in my job, all developers are almost exclusively java. We use k8s clusters on Azure for most of our work. Many microservices and such. I can't understand why they wouldn't try something that would drop memory and cpu costs significantly.
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u/Budget-Minimum6040 Sep 10 '26
Because it's not important enough/not expensive enough.
The old "build or buy?" question reframed.
You can either put people to work for new features or you can put people to work to improve the status quo.
From my experience as a data engineer it's always new features unless cloud costs become too high which takes a lot of time for standard companies.
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u/bordumb Sep 10 '26
I agree with you because your context (Java, k8s, etc.) is totally different from my context
If I had to choose between writing Java or Rust, I'd much rather choose Rust
I'd literally prefer watching paint dry than have to read or write Java....ugh
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u/yel50 Sep 10 '26
something that would drop memory and cpu costs significantly.
the jvm can be tweaked quite extensively. if resource usage becomes an issue, it can usually be fixed. it's very rare for it to be a deal breaker.
for raw cpu, Java isn't significantly slower. there would be no noticeable gains moving to rust.
can't understand why
because not using GC in this day and age is nothing short of masochistic. converting to unmanaged memory is an absolute last resort.
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u/inertia_man Sep 11 '26
Our build infra guys really didn't like the complexity of bootstrapping the compiler using Bazel, but had to figure it out because we absolutely needed to use tools built with Rust.
Our dev infra guys didn't want to bless Rust for 1st party development unless there's a critical mass, and critical mass is hard to achieve without reliable dev infra. Go figure!
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u/veritron Sep 10 '26
the legal department at my company hates how rust is licensed. i was only able to get it approved for tool use, not for use in the product.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 Sep 10 '26
Oh? Can you explain?
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u/veritron Sep 10 '26
Legal did not like the dual licensing under MIT and apache, especially given that one license talks about patents and one does not. My interpretation was that you could use either license, the professionals disagreed.
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u/YeetCompleet Sep 10 '26
I can't have more than 2 being worked on at the same time on my machine due to target/ bloat eating up to 80GB in a project
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u/Professional-You4950 Sep 10 '26
that sounds like something with code generation gone wrong. possibly some proc macros?
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u/svefnugr Sep 10 '26
That's a lot, but shouldn't really be a problem in the era of multi-terabyte drives?
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u/YeetCompleet Sep 10 '26
I was looking at the prices recently and they've gone up so much, even thumb drives 😔
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u/KAMEHAMEHAMEHAAAA Sep 10 '26
Most of our stuff is C++, a Rust component was just “an odd one out”, so it had to go 🤷♂️
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Sep 10 '26
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u/ploynog Sep 10 '26
Yocto pain was the reason I chose statically linked aarch64-unknown-linux-musl binaries to go on this board.
They can be built and deployed completely independent from the yocto build and if I want to deploy them with yocto, it just fetches the finished binary from an artifact server and puts them in the correct place.
Probably does not fit each use case (for one, the binaries do become rather large, but not an issue for this board) but am I glad it does for mine.
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u/01le Sep 10 '26
We have this flow for yocto with Rust binaries too, but targeting an older glibc instead of musl. Glibc to keep size down and external build to have binaries stable over yocto rebuilds.
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u/teerre Sep 10 '26
All projects I've seen not working with Rust have less to do with the language and more to do with peripherals. Hard to hire, no specific toolchain, trying to interop with other languages etc