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October 7, 2021 · 8 min read
Christos Hadjiaslanis
When building a company you are setting out to fundamentally solve a problem. For this reason, engineers have been systematically attracted by this romantic idea of changing the world with your brain and a laptop. We are at heart problem solvers.
As engineers, we can (and most of us have) become zealous at times about our solutions to these problems. We have pragmatists who just get stuff done - they address the symptom fast and effectively. We have idealists who will grind at an elegant scalable solution and try to treat the disease. Whichever camp you subscribe to, at a certain point you need to form an opinion about which technologies you are going to use to solve the problems you see in the world - and this opinion will inevitably cause contention.
Conventional wisdom is to 'use the right tool for the job'. The choice of programming language for example, depends on the domain of the problem you are trying to solve. If you're implementing some algorithm, in a secluded project, it's easy to make the case about what the language for the job may be. You can run a benchmark and literally test the execution time for each candidate language (if you're optimising for execution time). You can persuade yourself you've made a rational and 'objectively correct' decision.
However, in the context of building a business, your optimisation function is a high-dimensional mess involving performance, development velocity, hiring, server costs, ecosystem, tooling, support, licenses etc. You can assign weights to what is most important for your business, but at the end of the day the decision is inevitably qualitative.
At Synth, we're working on building the best data generator in the world. We made a conscious decision to use Rust for our main line of products. After more than a year of building I've had the opportunity to see Rust at its best and worst in the context of starting a company - this post is a compilation of these (at times cynical) thoughts.
Development Velocity#
Rust has a really steep learning curve. Coming from an OO background it took me months to become productive in Rust. This was incredibly frustrating for me as I felt that my lack of productivity was impacting the team, which it was. Even when you eventually do become productive (and you will), Rust forces you to really think deeply about what you're doing and things inevitably take longer to get over the line. A poorly thought out design decision today can come back to haunt you months later. What should be a simple change or refactor can end up resulting in complete tear down as you try to appease the borrow checker. This is deadly.
The entire premise of a startup is that you have to iterate rapidly. Very few companies know what they should be building from day one. It's an iterative process involving a feedback loop of talking to users and making changes to reflect the feedback. The faster you can make that feedback loop, the higher probability you have of success.
Correctness#
The evident hit in development velocity is redeemed to an extent by Rust's emphasis on writing correct programs. "if it compiles it works' so to speak. I've found this to be true for the most part while building with Rust and it is an absolute joy to work with for this reason.
Even if your program is not perfect, you understand the failure modes much better. The set of unknown failure modes is reduced substantially as your program breaks in exactly the way you expect it to. The lack of null pointers in conjunction with the Result paradigm (vs say, exceptions) compels you to build correct programs where edge cases are well understood and are handled explicitly by you (or unimplemented! but no one is perfect).
If you've reached product market fit - correctness may counteract the development velocity hit. When you know what you're building you need to iterate less. Your dev team is also going to be spending less time dealing with bugs as you've already dealt with that while trying to appease the compiler.
If it compiles it works - and this is an invaluable asset when you're aggressively shipping code.
Talent#
Getting great talent is unbelievably important for an early stage startup. The fact that the absolute number of competent and experienced Rust developers is so small initially seems detrimental to getting great people. This is exacerbated by Rust's steep learning curve as you need to hire someone with experience, or it's going to take months for them to become productive. However, this is not the full picture.
In our experience the competence of your average Rust developer is much higher than more conventional programming languages. Something spoke to these individuals when they picked up Rust, and it's hard to put your finger on it but it's that same quality that makes a great engineer. It's also been a pleasant surprise to find out that really good engineers will seek you out as an employer because you use Rust. They don't want to work in *script or Java or C++. They want to work with Rust because it's great.
Open Source#
At Synth, we've chosen to adopt an open-core business model. The idea behind an open-core business is you develop and open source product with a permissive license which solves a real technical problem. You work on building a user base, a community and a great product all out in the open. You then structure your business model around solving the corresponding organisational problem - and that's how you make money.
We've been really lucky to have a really active set of contributors - giving ideas, reporting bugs and contributing (at times very significant) code. It is hard to know for sure, but we have a strong hunch that a lot of the contributors are active because they have an interest in Rust projects specifically. A lot of our contributors are also interested in learning Rust - not necessarily being veterans of the language. This has worked out great as the more experienced members of our core team mentor and review code of young rustaceans, building a symbiotic positive feedback loop.
Thank you to all our contributors - you know who you are and you guys are amazing.
Libraries#
Rust has an ecosystem of incredibly high quality libraries. The Rust core team has led by example and focused on a high quality and tight standard library. The result of a highly focused standard library is (unfortunately) a lack of canonical libraries for doing things outside the standard library. So you want a webserver, pick from one of the 100s available. You want a crate ( Rust lingo for library) for working with JWT tokens? Here's 9, pick one. I mean, even something as fundamental as an asynchronous runtime is split between tokio and async-std and others. As a young rustacean this can be overwhelming.
What ends up happening over time is certain libraries become implicitly canonical as they receive overwhelming support and start becoming serious dependencies differentiating from their alternatives. Also in a project update from RustConf 2021 it was mentioned that the idea of having 'recommended crates' may be visited in the future.
The lack of canonical non-standard libraries is an issue when you're getting started - but over time this diminishes as you get a better understanding of the ecosystem. What has been constantly detrimental to our development velocity has been the lack of client libraries for Rust. We've had to write a bunch of different integrations ourselves, but they're often clunky as we don't have the time to invest in making them really high quality. For example most of Google's products have at best an unofficial code-generated crate maintained by the community, and at worst absolutely nothing. You need to write it from scratch.
Should you build your startup with Rust?#
Well it depends. Assuming you're building a product in the right domain for Rust (say a CLI as opposed to a social media site), even then the answer is not clear-cut. If you don't have close to 100% conviction that you know what you're building, I would be inclined to say no. Development velocity and being able to make rapid iterations is so important for an early stage startup that it outweighs a lot of the benefits that Rust brings to the table.
If your company is later stage, and you now understand exactly what you should be building (assuming this is every the case) then I would say yes. The 'correctness' of Rust programs and the propensity of Rust to attract great engineers can help in building a great engineering culture and a great company.
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