Should you rewrite in Rust?

E. Dunham

When coders hear about a promising programming language, they often think "I'd like to write something in that!" While rewriting an existing utility or codebase in a new language can sometimes be a good idea, there are many situations in which it's not -- and to make it even more difficult, the benefits and drawbacks of a rewrite vary greatly based on which languages you're using!

Come to this talk to learn about the various techniques you can use to integrate Rust with existing code in other languages, their pros and cons, and who's using them in the industry. Even if you haven't tried Rust yet, you'll get a crash course in its strengths, its weaknesses, and the many ways you can make it do cool stuff.

[laughingvampire]

most people don't really plan a rewrite, they try to do the "new code base from scratch" and thus this new code base is not exposed to all the problems the old code base had been and this is how they recreate the same bugs. Also because when people make rewrites they use the same programming language or some language that lacks the ability to assist the developer in eliminating categories of bugs.

so when a rewrite is needed I think it requires an assessment of the original code base, get in touch with the original developers, but having a log/diary of the decisions made would be a good thing to have, that explains the rationale behind the code, but we don't have this because we have these ideologies of "comments are evil, good code don't need comments" and lots of other nonsensical fanaticism about code. I am in favor of literate programming in the sense of writing with each commit the business requirement in plain English. But all this information is tracked separately and dis-jointly from the code base.

[laughingvampire]

my knee jerk reaction to this question is "yes rewrite in rust" because despite my love for C, all the languages that have come after C, and imitating its syntax have been a gigantic pile of trash, C++, Java, PHP, PERL, JavaScript, etc

[davefiddes]

Lots of really sound advice. Rust is currently the $LANGUAGE_DU_JOUR but some of the thoughts here would apply to any language transition I've come across in the 2 decades I've been doing this professionally. Well done!

[DCFusor]

3 somthing. Balancing, but the user is last? Yeah, you can't order some lists but...one you, a few colleagues and you damn well hope a lot of users. Or I'm really missing it here.