- After 2 years in production with a small (but write heavy) web service... it's a mixed bag. It definitely does the job, but not having a DB server does have not only benefits, but also drawbacks. The biggest being (lack of) caching the file/DB in RAM. As a result I have to do my own read caching, which is fine in Rust using the mokka caching library, but it's still something you have to do yourself, which would otherwise come for free with Postgres. This of course also makes it impossible to share the cache between instances, doing so would require employing redis/memcached at which point it would be better to use Postgres.
It has been OK so far, but definitely I will have to migrate to Postgres at one point, rather sooner than later.
- It depends very much on the language/server you are using. In Rust, IMO GraphQL is still the best, easiest and fastest way to have my Rust types propagated to the frontend(s) and making sure that I will have strict and maitainable contracts throughout the whole system. This is achieved via the "async_graphql" crate which allows you to define/generate the GraphQL schema in code, by implementing the field handlers.
If you are using something which requires you to write the GraphQL schema manually and then adapt both the server and the client... it's a completely different experience and not that pleasant at all.
- The answer to the final question in the article is: "Mostly, because the government forbids us from solving this problem". Start a company? That will be 2k for incorporation and 3k per year for auditing/bookkeeping. You want to build something physical in Europe? What a bummer, come here and pay the exorbitant carbon tax. You still think you are very smart? Your will pay 70% effective tax rate if you want to hire someone else to help you.
- I have a Rust web project written ~5 years ago. Zero updates until a month ago, also zero problems. A month ago I upgrade the docker file to latest rust, zero problems compiling. Could have left it to run like this for 5 more years probably but I decided to experiment...
I issue a `cargo update` to upgrade the leaf dependencies and do automatic minor version updates. Issue cargo check. Some new warnings from `clippy`, but it still compiles and runs without problems. Could have deployed for 5 more years, but I decided to experiment more...
I upgrade some of the libraries to major new versions - I am experienced and I know which ones will upgrade without problem. They do upgrade without problem. Could have deployed for 5 more years but decided to walk the extra mile...
I upgrade the more problematic ones, especially actix_web, the web framework, which had a massive rewrite and a huge new release with almost completely different API surface... It's a bit difficult to understand the changes, especially some parts of the old code written for the old version (which I no longer remember), but in an hour I'm done. Afterwards `cargo outdated` does not report any outdated libraries. I deploy for the next 5 years. Zero problems since then.
Well, it's not decades yet, but I can imagine similar effort to maintain it over the next decade.
- Just the straight/naive rewrite was ~3 times faster for my benchmark (which was running the program on the real dataset) and then I went down the rabbit hole and optimized it further and ended up ~5 times faster. Then slapped Rayon on top and got another ~2-3x depending on the number of cores and disk speed (the problem wasn't embarrassingly parallel, but still got a nice speedup).
Of course, all of this was mostly unneeded, but I just wanted to find out what am I getting myself into, and I was very happy with the result. My move to Rust was mostly not because of speed, but I still needed a fast language (where OCaml qualifies). This was also before the days of multicore OCaml, so nowadays it would matter even less.
- I migrated from OCaml to Rust around 2020, haven't looked back. Although Rust is quite a lot less elegant and has some unpleasant deficiencies (lambdas, closures, currying)... and I end up having to close one one eye sometimes and clone some large data-structure to make my life easier... But regardless, its huge ecosystem and great tooling allows me to build things comparatively so easily, that OCaml has no chance. As a bonus, the end result is seriously faster - I know because I rewrote one of my projects and for some time I had feature parity between the OCaml and Rust versions.
Nevertheless, I have fond memories of OCaml and a great amount of respect for the language design. Haven't checked on it since, probably should. I hope part of the problems have been solved.
- Having the power to deny others to mine blocks does not mean that you can obtain the tokens from their wallets. Miners can't sign transactions on users' behalf. You can rewrite all of history but then no exchange will accept your version of it to let you exchange the tokens for fiat. Also this will almost certainly crash the price of XMR substantially. And later people will be able to fork/restore the original version. The technological side of the blockchain is only part of the consensus/trust/market/popularity. People are the other part, and people will not pay the attacker for their successful attack.
- We can argue all day what "think" means and whether a LLM thinks (probably not IMO), but at least in my head the threshold for "decide" is much lower so I can perfectly accept that a LLM (or even a class) "decides". I don't have a conflict about that. Yeah, it might not be a decision in the human sense, but it's a decision in the mathematical sense so I have always meant "decide" literally when I was talking about a piece of code.
It's much more interesting when we are talking about... say... an ant... Does it "decide"? That I have no idea as it's probably somewhere in between, neither a sentient decision, nor a mathematical one.
- > a message bus is kinda integrated in the BEAM runtime or Erlang
You have that on a single node. If you need to run more than one node, you will end up inventing your own on top of mnesia and usually the results are not spectacular or/and you will end up paying happihacking to do it for you. Or one of the other Erlang oldtimers who you can count on the fingers of your hands.
This is really suboptimal compared to what you can achieve by using any normal language + any message bus. You are actually much better using a proper message bus even if you use Erlang.
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- I have several apps in production. I employ sqlx, axum, async_graphql, React frontend.
So far I don't know any better way of doing it and I have tried all the classic ways like PHP, Django etc. This is way superior. The only downside is that I am the only one who can touch the backend, but I guess if some of the projects grows enough, there will be enough incentives to find another Rust programmer besides me.
- Well, you can be a purist, or you can be practical. I write code, users run it, I get paid... While you are fixing the "modern web technologies". And I give you this, things are getting much better and I hope one day we'll run JSX natively in the browser without a build step ;)
And no, knockout.js is not better than React :)
- Well, I guess personal preference is also a thing. But I would say that the "market" doesn't agree with your thoughts on the matter (and I don't also, but my opinion matters way less).
You can write MVVM as an unmaintainable mess also. From my experience as a freelancer, I have had much harder time fixing badly written Angular projects (all versions) than such written in React. It seems that people as a whole tend to produce much better React than any other UI code that I have encountered ever. (and I have done my share of Desktop/Mobile too). Flutter is great, but it's also practically React in a proper language.
- Funny. To me JSX is a much superior language compared to HTML templating. And I would say it's provably so. You can do JSX-in-JS-in-JSX recursively in a way that is "natural" and "safe" and "maintainable". And with TypeScript you get great IDE support, ability to refactor and whatnot.
No need to trust my word, just look at the huge amount of code in JSX that the world is maintaining at the moment.
I would say the only problem is the performance cost that we have to pay for this - the shadow DOM and (as a result) the hooks mess that we have in React. But it feels more like a problem that needs to be solved in order to use the much superior way of writing code (JSX). Not the other way around (sacrifice JSX for performance)
And I get that it can be overwhelming if you still haven't made the "jump", it just doesn't sound fair to criticize something that you don't understand.
The "web service" is only the user facing part which bears the least load. Read caching is useful there too as users look at statistics, so calculating them once every 5-10 minutes and caching them is needed, as that requires scanning the whole database.
A CDN is something I don't even have. It's not needed for the amount of users I have.
If I was using Postgres, these writer processes + the web service would share the same read cache for free (coming from Posgres itself). The difference wouldn't be huge if I would migrate right now, but now I already have the custom caching.